Where your eBook money goes

[rhadin]

For another view of the costs of book production, see The eBook Wars: The Price Battle (III) -- One Author's View, which was largely written by MR member Randolph Lalonde who is a full-time author who self-publishes his books as ebooks.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by rhadin

For another view of the costs of book production, see The eBook Wars: The Price Battle (III) -- One Author's View, which was largely written by MR member Randolph Lalonde who is a full-time author who self-publishes his books as ebooks.

Great read, thanks for the link-love seeing the issue from the authors points of view.

[mcl]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

There are certain costs which apply to every book regardless of the format it is produced in. These costs include editing and marketing. The question here is should those costs be passed along to all consumers, or should one specific group of consumers bear the brunt of these costs so that other consumers may receive the benefit of lower prices?

The truth is, the book is edited before the process forks to either ebook or pbook. HC, TPB, and MMPB all have their share of such costs figured into their cover price. Why should ebooks be exempt?

Why are ebook buyers so special that everyone else has to pay for editing and they don't?

If the book were released only in e-format then those costs would have to be passed along to ebook buyers. Why does the presence of a paper edition make that any different?

The shared costs of producing a book should be appropriately shared among all formats, paper and electronic alike. Anything else is inequitable. Saying that one's own preferred format can be priced lower because all the other formats will pick up the costs sounds selfish to me.

Ok, let's take your argument:

title A has cost X associated with it.

In the past, cost X was passed to the consumer as part of the price of item N.


Today, item N costs the same and covers the same cost X that always existed, but now there's a new item -- P -- that you're arguing should bear its own share of cost X.


If you really wanted to be equitable, you'd raise the price of P ***AND*** lower the price of N, since some of the cost X which was buried in the price of N is now not being borne entirely by N, but by both N and P together.


But that's not what's happening.


And since that's not happening, the profit that the publisher always made off N isn't held constant with the introduction of P (due to cost equalization). The profit is increased, because N is still bearing all the cost of X, but that cost is being used as an argument to raise the price of P.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by rhadin

It is not impossible to go from InDesign to ePub.

It's just a headache. Adobe are, though, working on this.

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

DRM licensing costs can easily eat half the cost savings from production if not more.

Returns on a physical book routinely run between 30 and 40 percent of the entire print run. The key difference is, DRM licensing is trivially avoidable, returns aren't.

[nboshart]

It's really not that bad to go from InDesign to ePub. There are a lot of tweaks you have to do, but you can get a pretty good book out of CS4.

In fact, it may be useful for people to get a better idea of what goes into making an epub, so here's some resources: http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/epub/howto/

And here's a presentation from Liza Daly called "Getting Past Good Enough" which really talks about publishers' ebook issues, and how it takes actual work to make a good one.

http://digitalbookworld.com/2010/get...oks-liza-daly/

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by mcl

Ok, let's take your argument:

title A has cost X associated with it.

In the past, cost X was passed to the consumer as part of the price of item N.


Today, item N costs the same and covers the same cost X that always existed, but now there's a new item -- P -- that you're arguing should bear its own share of cost X.


If you really wanted to be equitable, you'd raise the price of P ***AND*** lower the price of N, since some of the cost X which was buried in the price of N is now not being borne entirely by N, but by both N and P together.


But that's not what's happening.


And since that's not happening, the profit that the publisher always made off N isn't held constant with the introduction of P (due to cost equalization). The profit is increased, because N is still bearing all the cost of X, but that cost is being used as an argument to raise the price of P.

Instead it allows the author to earn out their advance faster and publishers recoup their up front costs and give them a greater ability to buy other books from their authors.

Your argument still comes back to saying people who buy ebooks are special and don't need to pay their share of the costs.

[mcl]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Instead it allows the author to earn out their advance faster and publishers recoup their up front costs and give them a greater ability to buy other books from their authors.

Your argument still comes back to saying people who buy ebooks are special and don't need to pay their share of the costs.

And your argument still comes back to saying publishers are horribly inefficient and have tons of unnecessary overhead associated with DTBs, and want to shovel it off on ebooks rather than fix their incredibly broken industry.

You're also acting as though the publishers receive no monies for ebooks. Those alone, coupled with the greatly reduced overhead for producing an ebook version of a DTB, nicely offset the costs you keep harping on.


But since publishers are deathly afraid of cost-efficient (to them) ebooks killing off the incredibly cost-inefficient (to them) DTB market for some reason I can't possibly fathom, they refuse to pursue ebooks in an attempt to prop up the DTB market.

And, in the process, attempt to shovel as much of the cost of the DTB market onto the price of an ebook, in the hopes of both recovering money that they could better recover through profit, and killing off the ebook market due to high prices.

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by raac

yes, I agree with you, but it seems the publishers may not see it that way.

Personally, I feel that if you buy physical copy then you should have the right to download the e-book.

I could go along with that, but most of the arguments I've seen in favor of ebooks being cheaper than pbooks assume that you *won't* buy the pbook. So how do you feel about making the publisher eat the costs when nothing except the cheaper ebook sells?

Mcl's arguments *might* be true for books in a publisher's backlist. Those have already been published & pbooks sold to recoup the publisher's investment. (It doesn't matter whether or not sales actually have recouped that-the investment has already been combined & amortized over multiple books to account for that. So, if the pbook has been published & sold, then publishing the ebook incurs minimal cost, as Mcl says.) The problem is that most people don't want ebooks from the publisher's backlist-they want the *new* books to come out in ebook format. And that, IMO, is a different matter. In that case the publishing costs should be shared between the pbook & ebook versions-since they're both 'published' at the same time.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by calvin-c

The problem is that most people don't want ebooks from the publisher's backlist-they want the *new* books to come out in ebook format.

Well, I want an entire series in ebook form, including older books. Or the value of ebooks of newer ones as ebooks is significantly reduced.

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Well, I want an entire series in ebook form, including older books. Or the value of ebooks of newer ones as ebooks is significantly reduced.

You're right-sloppy thinking on my part, I was thinking of individual books vs a series.

[guyanonymous]

I'm a definite on the series issue. If someone recommends a book to me that's part of a series I've not read, I find that I have to start at the beginning. I can't jump into a series part way through.

As for individual books, I've been recommended older books, been led in my fantasticfiction searches to older examples of author's work, and stumbled on genres only to seek out more of the founding works in that type of book (i.e., time travel, alternate history, etc)...and so many of them are out of print, especially the sci-fi and mystery stuff. As for finding it on the used book market, I'm not out to collect, I'm out to read, so a $35-$500 paperback isn't in my budget.

[Lemurion]

Put me down for wanting the whole series in one format from one source. (I hated that Fictionwise had Simon Green's Nightside City series in a mix of ereader and mobi - I wanted just one format for all of them.)

[Seli]

Originally Posted by mcl

...
And since that's not happening, the profit that the publisher always made off N isn't held constant with the introduction of P (due to cost equalization). The profit is increased, because N is still bearing all the cost of X, but that cost is being used as an argument to raise the price of P.

Your argument is only correct if sales of P are additive to the sales of N, if sales of N are replaced by P profits would decrease if the costs of production would not be shared by N and P.

The big problem is no-one at the moment knows what the effect of the ebook market is on the paper market, or on total sales. Sales apparently are so small as not to really matter at the moment. Therefore, publishers have to be conservative with pricing. If due to easier access the total sales of content improves, they will either make more profit or can lower prices. However, if ebook sales replace paper sales (incredibly likely in at least the paperback market) introducing ebooks at a low price will lead to losses in the future. And it is incredibly difficult to raise prices once people get used to them.

[raac]

>Your argument is only correct if sales of P are additive to the sales of N, if sales of N are
>replaced by P profits would decrease if the costs of production would not be shared by N

Quite.