Publisher Backlash Against Amazon

[griffonwing]

That's great to hear. Once I get my first reader, I'll start exploring all of the possibilities of publishers and websites. I'm currently ignorant of this topic. But I'm learning.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by Tuna

Sorry, I didn't mean you to think that my comments were aimed at you in particular - your post simply started my train of thought.

No offense taken. I assumed it was aimed at me since you quoted me and used "you" a lot in the reply. I do that, too, sometimes without realizing it. It's a broad "you" but I mean "we" and "folks in general".

[fugazied]

The paper book publishing industry is in a similar position to the recording industry, the movie industry etc. Either adapt or die. It's publisher responses like this that indicate a company in jeopardy.
If they don't provide a cheap and easy way for readers to purchase their media, "I want book x on my electronic media device", the reader may simply go to the pirate bay where the book has been transfered into electronic format and provided for free. Or alternately since the book isn't available in electronic format they will simply buy a different book from a different publisher.
This company has other options besides Amazon, sounds like they have decided to bury theirs heads in the sand and go bankrupt over the next 15 years as people move to increasingly advanced ebook devices.

[RickyMaveety]

Originally Posted by rhadin

I'm not certain that they are boycotting free speech; rather they have decided that they do not wish to be subjected to Amazon's speech and have exercised their right of free assembly.

If that were the case, they could go to the convention and just skip Amazon's speech. That's certainly an easy enough thing to do. But to boycott the entire convention simply because one person is being "allowed" to make a presentation? That's overkill, and rather blatant at that. Not that overkill is ever subtle.

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by Tuna

I have some sympathy for them with regards to Amazon. It's the same as the malls and hypermarkets making it impossible for the small local shop to compete. You can't just roll your eyes and suggest (as others have done) that all they needed to do was 'behave like Amazon'.

There is a huge change going on in how we consume our media - and whilst we benefit from artificially low book prices, we suffer from a reduction of the ecosystem, at least in the short term.

In their case they may have had years during which their existing business model both paid their wages and allowed them to run the sort of business that they enjoyed. Now that business model is failing, expecting them to enthusiastically jump into an entirely different model of which they have no experience and little evidence of useful profit to be had is optimistic.

The people in the ebook business right now are pioneers. You have to applaud and support their pioneering spirit as the market matures. But you also have to accept that not everyone is a pioneer.

With all due respect, Tuna, I am afraid that the division between "pioneers" and "normal people" is simply outdated concept at the beginning of 21 century.

It is not a phenomenon limited to publishing world, it is affecting practically everybody today. A constant and neverending change is a fact of life. Whatever is our profession, we have to be "pioneers"... or become obsolete, and quickly.

[Tuna]

Originally Posted by Ankh

With all due respect, Tuna, I am afraid that the division between "pioneers" and "normal people" is simply outdated concept at the beginning of 21 century.

It is not a phenomenon limited to publishing world, it is affecting practically everybody today. A constant and neverending change is a fact of life. Whatever is our profession, we have to be "pioneers"... or become obsolete, and quickly.

The important distinction here is between the change we all experience, and the changes to businesses. Even in today's rapidly evolving market, businesses don't go bust overnight. Changing your business model is a risky, disruptive and expensive process. In some cases it can also mean that the reasons you went into a particular business no longer apply (you might have opened that bookstore more because you like meeting people than because you want to sell literature).

Whilst we as individuals will do the best we can to evolve (and when we do, we like to kid ourselves that it's easy and we'll always be up with the times), changing a business is a whole new ball game. If you have even just a couple of employees who's income depends on your decisions, you won't take such changes lightly.

In that respect, I think that yes, people who are changing their business models so early in the new market for ebooks are pioneers. There's no model for sucess yet, no ma and pa stores to emulate, no stable market to join in or even stable format to back. Whatever you do this year will need to be revised next, and the year after that and beyond. There is a reasonable choice between hanging on for as long as you can whilst things settle down, and jumping in with both feet knowing that you're going to be making radical decisions every few months for the next few years. Knowing that just one of those radical decisions could be very costly (you could have just converted all of your publishing to .lit), it's hard to be casual about 'constant and never ending change'.

[HansTWN]

As a business owner I have to say, sometimes you have to meet change head on, even though you are worried. You have to try to manage change, not forget everything that was before. But slowly try new ideas. What would you have done if you had had a horse buggy business in the 1920s? And look at Kodak and Polaroid.

[Tuna]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

As a business owner I have to say, sometimes you have to meet change head on, even though you are worried. You have to try to manage change, not forget everything that was before. But slowly try new ideas. What would you have done if you had had a horse buggy business in the 1920s? And look at Kodak and Polaroid.

Indeed. It's tempting to think that you would have sold your horse buggy business and become Henry Ford - but a lot of businesses tried different combinations and fell by the wayside. Perhaps a few happy ones turned to horse management instead and by 'de-evolving' had a rewarding and long career.

One firm local to us used to repair bicycles in the 1900's, but started to help with the radical new airplanes when a customer came in asking if they could fix his. They're now a hugely successful aerospace contractor with a global clientelle. Dozens of other bicycle repair shops in the city weren't so lucky, and no amount of hindsight would allow them to all become aerospace contractors - the market doesn't work like that.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by fugazied

The paper book publishing industry is in a similar position to the recording industry, the movie industry etc. Either adapt or die.

I think book publishers are on far more solid footing than the recording industry, and I do not think the movie industry's woes are anything other than imaginary.

Unlike the recording industry, the movie industry and the publishing industry unavoidably make the difference well more than 9 times out of 10 between something hopelessly amateurish and acceptably professional for general public consumption.

And while I agree with you that book publishers will eventually need to become more amicable toward electronic methods of publication and distribution, and do so at saner prices than prevalent today... I'm not certain that time is now.

Frankly, as an owner of an eBook reading device, it is amply clear to me that neither the hardware nor the eBook formats out there make it possible to easily publish professional looking eBooks aimed at a general reading audience.

Though obviously many folks on here are happy enough with the experience, on account of many positives that even butchered eBooks cannot negate; the general readership will not pay out $200 - $300+ dollars to read poorly formatted dark-grey-on-light-grey text books.

In a few years, when the devices are under $100, have better contrast, offer reasonably full colour, and work with one or more standardized formats that do not make typographically professional eBooks more complex than practically unformatted novels downright impossible... perhaps then, or, more likely, a few years after then, book publishers will find themselves in an adapt or die situation. But that's definitely not less than 5 years away, and very likely more than 10 years away.

Until that time, eBook readers and eBooks will remain important primarily to a niche interest group, and not even all important to many of them. (i.e.: How many kindle-owners [doubtless either already or due to be the largest subgroup within the eBook reader owning community] stop reading or buying regular paper books? I suspect not many. And to any Kindle owners itching to reply to say they have, if you are on mobileread, chances are you are not representative of the average person.)

To be clear, I agree with your sentiment... but I think your prediction goes too far from overgeneralizing based on the very unrepresentative (if admittedly more progressive and enlightened than average) views here on these happy fora.

- Ahi

[Alisa]

I have to chuckle that we have both an Ahi and a Tuna in this thread.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by ahi

In a few years, when the devices are under $100, have better contrast, offer reasonably full colour, and work with one or more standardized formats that do not make typographically professional eBooks more complex than practically unformatted novels downright impossible... perhaps then, or, more likely, a few years after then, book publishers will find themselves in an adapt or die situation. But that's definitely not less than 5 years away, and very likely more than 10 years away.

I think within 5 years the display, power saving and battery technology will be improved enough that stand alone reading devices will be either a thing of the past or a niche item. When people can read comfortably on their phone, tablet, netbook, UMPC or whatever, and become used to the convenience of getting content whenever they want, synching bookmarks, notes, etc. between devices, they will be far less inclined to buy print. People are already turning away from newspapers and magazines to websites. That's a huge market and a natural for electronic distribution. People love their book collections. Very few people regard their old newspapers and mags as a "collection". Within a week, they're trash for the recycling. Plus we're now seeing a move towards digital textbooks. That's going to get a whole generation of students even more used to reading on devices. So I totally agree with you about the obstacles. I just believe we'll overcome them faster than you think.

[Daithi]

Rue Morgue's refusal to sell ebooks not only costs them profits, but it also costs their authors (or author's heirs) profits as well. Any author that stays with this publisher will be losing money (maybe substancial money), and I have to believe this stance will eventually put Rue Morgue out of business. At least they can blame Amazon when it happens.

BTW, I wish Harper Paperbacks would hurry up and make an ebook version of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. I haven't read it, and I'm just waiting for an ebook version.

[Tuna]

Just a quick question - how certain can we be that publishing electronically will increase profits for niche publishers? If you can sell through Amazon, are you usefully increasing your audience by providing electronic copies? If you sell more 'locally', would you benefit from a wider audience - would many more people actually want to buy books from a small fish in a distant sea? (see - this book stuff is definitely fishy business!)

Against that, what realistically is the set up cost of providing ebooks to a commercial standard? How much does it cost a publisher to convert a single book?

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Tuna

JAgainst that, what realistically is the set up cost of providing ebooks to a commercial standard? How much does it cost a publisher to convert a single book?

That question deserves its own thread.

Off the top of my head:
Good OCR software--ABBYY Finereader Pro is currently $400; while that'll work for any number of books, it (or something like it) will be necessary for even one. (Don't assume that any publisher has digital copies of their books, especially those not currently in print.)

eBook software: mostly free; we can assume maybe $50 in ancillary software that might work with their particular system. (Tif split/combine software, or indexing software, or whatever.)

1 physical copy of book to be destroyed.
Scanner: high-speed double-sided scanners of decent quality & speed start at costs of about $500 new. (Theoretically, anyone could use an all-in-one copy/scan/print device. It might be worth doing for one book, but if you were doing five, what you saved in startup costs, you'd've lost in hourly wages.)

Time: 1 hr scanning (on high-speed scanner; includes time for QC'ing page count to make sure there's no skips). Scan at 400dpi for paperbacks & most hardcovers. Double this time if there are color images involved; switching the settings back & forth takes a while.

OCR: 1 hour. Being generous, there; it's probably less for most books.

OCR correction: 1/2 minute/page, if you've got a quick & skilled corrector and relatively clean originals (no script fonts, no 5-pt type footnotes, etc.); up to 5 min/page otherwise.

Output to Word or HTML: instant (more-or-less)

Edit Word/HTML to fix formatting:
Normal paperback: 1-2 hours
Slightly more complex book: 2-5 hrs
Textbook with images, charts, index, etc.: 10-20 hrs

Final QC, checking for typos, formatting errors, and so on:
Normal paperbacks: 1 min/2 pages (average, not exact)
More complex: 1 min/page
Textbook: 1 1/2 min/page (up to 3 min/page for books that are just packed with charts & tables). Index QC takes longer.

Assume that the labor for everything costs at least double minimum wage, except for the raw scanning, which can probably be found at half-again minimum wage. In large cities in the US, assume you can find scanning for $10-$12/hour, and the rest at $15-$20/hour.

Then you have the "make an ebook" part. If the ebook is a PDF, this takes at fastest, no time; for a "good" PDF, 10 minutes (add title/author metadata and bookmarks). For most other ebook formats, call it 30 minutes each if it's a simple conversion; adapting complex tables to .mobi or .epub may not be so quick.

TOTAL ESTIMATE for a standard paperback:
$1000 equipment (hardware/software)
~10 hrs labor @ $15/hour = $150

I can convert a paperback to PDF in an afternoon. But I've been doing this a long time, and know shortcuts that are rare even in digital imaging industries.

That's not counting the time it takes to learn the software, the ebook formats, research what scanners work best, and so on. And it entirely ignores the marketing side of it: now that you have an ebook, what do you do with it?

[Daithi]

The guy at Kindleformatting.com charges $60 an hour and estimates that fiction books already in MS Word or PDF format will take between 1 to 3 hours, i.e. $60 to $180 per book. He provides discounts for publishers converting more than 5 books.

What if the book isn't available in an electronic format? He doesn't say, but I'm guessing another $200 or $300 for scanning and checking for scanning errors.