Stars fall in Amazon protest about ebook prices

[FF2]

That's the whole idea - any of these ratings or all of them are totally subjective. Anyone can rate something high or low depending on their needs.

When I learned about epub-library loans I did go checking and found a long waiting list for limited copies of a few books. Being the somewhat instant gratification person, I decided to go for the K3 anyway and forgo library books and their potentially long waiting list. I have not rated the k3 - I have rarely rated anything but I do read ratings. I skipped a battery powered (or underpowered) leaf blower recently due to ratings.

[jhempel24]

Originally Posted by FF2

I skipped a battery powered (or underpowered) leaf blower recently due to ratings.

I wonder what DRM was on that!!!

[FF2]

Originally Posted by jhempel24

I wonder what DRM was on that!!!

I was able to turn another leaf without worrying about drm.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

No, dude. Just, no.
My point is that you have to pay people to do this kind of work, and there are all sorts of costs that people don't even think about.

What no? You said that it costs 10k to convert. I say it doesn't, proof: the people who upload illegal books. There are costs, but if they go higher that $50 nobody would do it. All other costs that you mention don't actually go into making the conversion.

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

That's your argument? Seriously? No one on the web has mentioned it, therefore those costs don't exist?
You're going to need lawyers to revise the highly individualized contracts and to help in the negotiations. And no, lawyers are not cheap, even when they're on staff.

Well, you tend to mention advances and royalties as two separate costs when you talk about what makes the price of a book so I guess that you of all people would have mentioned anything that is remotely significant. The costs of the lawyers will be divided to all the books that are sold.
Publishers won't actually say how many books they sell, but according to this in 2009 there were $13.483 billion worth of books sold in North America.

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Uh, no.
Enslaving interns is not a viable business model. You either need to hire people or contract it out. Publishing is a for-profit enterprise, and people do not line up outside the door to offer to do grunt work for free.

So publishers don't have interns? Ever?

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Uh, no.
There is no "automatic" here. You need servers, database software, DB admins, programmers and backups.

Do you remember saying this:

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Ebooks are tiny -- typically 1mb or less. An ebook will cost you $0.000062 to back up to an external hard drive and takes virtually no time. Backing up your files is virtually free.

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

You need to integrate the sales data from numerous retailers. You have to train people how to use it -- including your accountants, upper management, marketing and pretty much everyone in the company who needs to see sales data.

Actually you just need to know at the end of the month how many books each retailer sold, and see the number match the money flow to the account. The sales data will be a simple table ebook/retailer/price/profit.

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Not really. This is not a manufacturing process where you can leverage economies of scale. This is all human labor, and it isn't cheaper to hire 2 people than it is to hire 1.

If it is really how you say, than the higher costs come from incompetence. I don't know if you ever used OCR software, but it can work connected directly to the scanner, so you get the result pretty fast. It also works very well with images, tables, special characters. Of course the publishers could give the task to a dinosaur that needs help reading an email.

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

And to be clear, I'm not saying that the costs are so insufferably great and offer an insurmountable obstacle. I'm simply pointing out that it is not free, that the costs are higher than the average person presumes, and that converting a backlist title into an ebook incurs costs that need to be earned back.

What you said is that is costs 10k. It doesn't.

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Normally, the author gets 20-25% of the cover price, no matter how much the retailer charges for it.

Can you give a quote for that?
Because according to this article from 2009:

Standard royalties for new books are as follows: 10% for hardcover, 7% (or sometimes 7.5%) for trade paperback, and 5% for mass market. Often, publishers will agree to incentive escalators (usually only on hardcovers). Here's a very typical hardcover example:

10% on the first 5,000 copies sold
12.5% on the next 5,000 copies sold
15% thereafter

[jbjb]

One thing that seems to be being missed in all of this - regardless of whether or not people believe ebooks to be overpriced with respect to pbooks, books of all formats are actually amazingly good value. For less than the price (in very many cases) of a takeaway pizza, you can get something that can give you pleasure for the rest of your life.

With regard to the arguments in this thread, I'm very much of the same mind as Kali. Publishers, retailers etc. are all businesses and are by necessity run in the interests of their shareholders. Even the most rudimentary understanding of how business works points out the fallacy in trying to define price solely based on the costs of production. Any business will try and charge what the market will bear - set the price high initially (e.g. hardback) to get the custom of those who are willing to pay more for early access, then lower the price, usually in stages, to ensure that you get the most that each customer is willing to pay. That's not immoral - it's standard business practice.

/JB

[dorino]

Originally Posted by jbjb

That's not immoral - it's standard business practice.

Standard business practice has the ability to be quite upsetting.

[Magnesus]

And immoral.

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by Magnesus

And immoral.

You think charging what the market will bear for a non-essential item is immoral? Why, precisely?

/JB

[karunaji]

Publishers have used digital files for printing exclusively last 15-20 years but at the same time they often can't find a digital copy of their published paper books. It shows how irresponsible they were towards archiving. If properly implemented, overhead costs of backup storing would be minimal and considerably lower than repeated OCR and proofreading. It is a perfect textbook example of a business failure due to considering only short term goals.

That said, even converting digital files to properly formatted ebooks is not that simple and takes a lot of time. Most pirated versions are in pdf format, not epub or mobi. I have heard some local publishers complaining that switching to ebook platform requires substantial investment which they don't have. I wonder, why they have difficulties attracting investors and raising necessary funds? Maybe potential investors having survived countless dot com failures are now cautious with yet another e-bubble. Or maybe they think that this business model is no longer profitable and have decided to put money in other enterprises like Amazon, Apple, Google etc.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by karunaji

Publishers have used digital files for printing exclusively last 15-20 years but at the same time they often can't find a digital copy of their published paper books. It shows how irresponsible they were towards archiving.

They were not irresponsible. Cheap data storage is a new thing; 10 years ago, a 20gb hard drive cost more than $200. Twenty years ago, you couldn't buy that much storage space in a single device.

And what if they did store those files? Modern computers won't even run the software they were using to format the books for printing. They might've put them in PDF format, using Distiller for Acrobat 4.0; if they need to make any changes today, they'll need to convert & reformat entirely. But mostly, they put them in a nice postscript file, printed, and after the print run was done for hc & pb, they deleted the file to make space for new books.

If properly implemented, overhead costs of backup storing would be minimal and considerably lower than repeated OCR and proofreading. It is a perfect textbook example of a business failure due to considering only short term goals.

Overhead costs would be low now. Ten years ago, arranging long-term storage involved IT costs, database creation costs (and what program would that be in? Could they use it today? How much should they spend upgrading to new software every few years as database tech changes?), storage of the drives themselves, tracking the licenses on all the necessary software and noting what goes obsolete when... I don't think they were short-sighted for not realizing that, in less than a decade, changes in IT tech would drastically affect the way every company does business.

I *really* don't think they were short-sighted for not correctly guessing what those changes would be and arranging their archives in a way that would work today.

Suppose they *had* decided to start saving every print-ready book... and now they have a swarm of Pagemaker 4.0 files. Is it really that much easier to convert those to epub (with all the scrambled formatting the conversion will cause) than to scan & OCR the book again? Was it worth the cost of keeping *all* their books, in order to have a digital copy of the few dozens they'd want to reprint at some point?

[karunaji]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

They were not irresponsible. Cheap data storage is a new thing; 10 years ago, a 20gb hard drive cost more than $200. Twenty years ago, you couldn't buy that much storage space in a single device.

Come on, they used automatic backup systems on tapes 15 years ago. Costs were marginally higher but definitely not that much that they would need to delete source files (in PageMaker or whatever). Hint: books are not graphics. The cover pictures were probably several times larger than the rest of the book. You could save thousands of books on one tape. Most probably they actually did this all this but forgot where they put the tapes.

Modern computers won't even run the software they were using to format the books for printing.

PageMaker installs fine on Windows XP which is still the most popular OS in business. The worries about obsolete formats are overblown. I can still open Winword 2.0 files.

Is it really that much easier to convert those to epub (with all the scrambled formatting the conversion will cause) than to scan & OCR the book again?

It is. You have to work (and sometimes a lot) on epub formatting but OCRed text is even worse because it requires all the same plus proofreading. Formatting generally involves setting a proper style tags to each paragraph and trained person can do it rather quickly. Proofreading, on the other hand, takes much longer unless you don't mind those annoying typos which are bad for reputation. So, it increases conversion costs considerably.

Was it worth the cost of keeping *all* their books, in order to have a digital copy of the few dozens they'd want to reprint at some point?

Why not publish and sell all books in e-format? They could still sell enough copies to offset conversion expenses and even make some money. But it is not cheap if the full process of OCR, formatting, proofreading is required.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by karunaji

Come on, they used automatic backup systems on tapes 15 years ago.

Why do you believe that?

But the main problem is that the process of publishing a book does not contain the final version in electronic format such that it would have been easy to archive it. The final version of the book was what was printed or the film for it.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by karunaji

Come on, they used automatic backup systems on tapes 15 years ago.

And had to store those tapes in ways they wouldn't get damaged. Why bother, for the few titles that would ever be reprinted?

PageMaker installs fine on Windows XP which is still the most popular OS in business.

If you can find it. It's no longer available; InDesign is Adobe's current page layout program. So you have to import, hope that data isn't lost or hopelessly scrambled (if the original had special text boxes set up for layout purposes, they might wind up in the wrong places when it imports), and then sort out fonts & standard layout issues.

The worries about obsolete formats are overblown. I can still open Winword 2.0 files.

I can open almost anything that's ever been used as a word processor--but not with Office 2007, which is what a lot of businesses are using now.

And the issue isn't, "can you open it today?" but "what would it have taken to make it usable for the entire last fifteen years--what software & conversion plugins would've been necessary, and how much did they cost?" Because if you're keeping archives long-term, it's not about "we'll be able to open this in 15 years," but "we'll be able to open this at any point in the next 15 years." Or longer.

A long-term archiving system would have involved converting every book to a new format every couple of years, to keep up with software changes. And that takes devoting real time & resources to archiving, not just having a pile of tapes somewhere that you hope will still be readable when you decide you want those books again.

Why not publish and sell all books in e-format? They could still sell enough copies to offset conversion expenses and even make some money. But it is not cheap if the full process of OCR, formatting, proofreading is required.

Because they don't have the rights to sell them all in e-format. Different contracts with each author, and 15 years ago, ebook rights weren't a standard part of the contract. They might gain those rights (and they might still be able to prevent the author from offering the ebook elsewhere), but they'll have to negotiate each new release.

Why keep huge archives of books they may never have the right to sell?

Any small, independent press could certainly have been archiving its books & be able to reformat them fairly quickly. But for the big publishing houses, with hundreds or thousands of new releases each year--it wasn't economical. It is now, but I don't blame them for not having decided to invest in archiving their entire production runs (and trying to guess which archiving method would work best) over a decade ago.

[NVash]

Have most of these publishers even realized the growing market with ebooks? Why is this such a problem? Cant they just go to the authors, pitch the idea to them and that be that?

As for the back catalog, I have no idea how many books will ever see the light of day as ebooks. Especially the books from publishers who no longer exist. How will they ever become ebooks? Is it even possible?

[Fbone]

Ebooks have only been a serious marketable product for a few years possibly less than 10 years. Has mobi, epub, bbeb even been around that long? I wouldn't expect any publisher to have a nicely ebook formatted digital file of anything published before 2005.

I don't know the average length of a publishing contract but it's not forever. As Elfwreck said why keep archives of products you no longer have the right to own. If you can't reprint it or release it, then you'll spend as little as possible on it's preservation.