Charlie Stross: Publishers "Cutting their own throats"

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Have you actually offered your services to any publishers??? ... it's also a mind-numbingly boring job that tends to ruin any enjoyment in the work being dealt with. It's one thing doing a few to get some PD work out in a different form but quite another if you end up doing it full time...

I've done it full time; I love it. Very few companies of any sort are willing to hire OCR correction & doc formatting specialists. They believe that machine OCR is plenty good enough, all customer complaints to the contrary. Also, a lot of the OCR correction can be sent to typists in India who work much, much cheaper than US employees.

Publishers don't have the budget to hire people to format the *entire* backlist they intend to produce; they don't have any numbers to indicate that they'd make enough extra in sales to justify those. And they have no interest in hiring one or two people; they'd only consider it if they had a budget and workflow process that worked on a large scale. Smaller publishers, who are happy to hire people to convert older books, do so piecemeal rather than having steady work.

[HappyMartin]

I certainly never meant to insult any author and my point about the printing costs not being insignificant does not mean I believe the costs are higher than 10% of the total costs. I consider 10% to be a significant cost. If it is 10% of the costs to print and distribute a pbook then please explain why an ebook is more expensive.

I understand that the costs of printing are less than what the public might think but the costs are not so low that they are negative and result in an ebook being more expensive to produce than a pbook. That would mean the printers are actually paying the publishers to print the book. Call me naive but I think that is unlikely. I may not be buying tons of paper but I know printers well enough to know that they charge for their services. Perhaps if I was a bigger buyer of print then they would start paying me but I am clearly not there yet.

[leebase]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

And I don't get the point about not using agency pricing - Amazon dominated in the pre-Agency pricing days in part because they offered NYT bestsellers for $9.99.

Imagine that. Someone can actually dominate a market if only they have enough money to sell a product below wholesale.

Surely there's nothing but good to come from such a practice.

Lee

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by leebase

Imagine that. Someone can actually dominate a market if only they have enough money to sell a product below wholesale.

Surely there's nothing but good to come from such a practice.

Lee

Not quite, they are still dominating and now they are making more money off these than before. Amazon is just a lot smarter than the publishers.

[karunaji]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Publishers don't have the budget to hire people to format the *entire* backlist they intend to produce; they don't have any numbers to indicate that they'd make enough extra in sales to justify those. And they have no interest in hiring one or two people; they'd only consider it if they had a budget and workflow process that worked on a large scale. Smaller publishers, who are happy to hire people to convert older books, do so piecemeal rather than having steady work.

I think that the process is profitable but the profits are not big enough for them to bother. They could hire a couple of people and sell produced e-books for small profit but that would only a rounding error in their total turnover. Let's say, they produce 80 e-books and manage to get additional $1000 per year. They simply are not interested. And that's sad because many people would love to read those books if they were available.

There is a similar situation with books in Latvian. I am a member of non-profit organization which wants to reprint an important book that has been out of sale for 10 years already. The rights belong to the publishing house and we offered to cover all costs and simply pay them royalties. They are not interested because it will be only 2000 copies and they don't care about several hundred euros even if thye don't have to do anything at all.

In the meantime the availability of pirated (free of DRM) Latvian e-books is much bigger than any sales. Publishers who want to sell e-books are irrationally stuck with DRM implementation. If they dropped the DRM, many problems would go away and sales would increase overnight.

This comment says it all.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by taustin

Looks like a vanity press to me. While not all vanity presses are outright scams, I am not inclined to take anything from anyone who charges authors to publish instead of paying them at face value.

They offer a service, why wouldn't they charge for it?

Originally Posted by taustin

That would mean exactly that, yes. That is the most notable characteristic of the vanity press industry, in fact.

Can you find a price list of a printing press that would print a paperback for $1 per copy?

And you ignored the rest of my post, so I'll ask you again: do you think that it's fair that the author would be payed $5000 for writing the book while another person gets payed more than $2000 for the format shifting of a single book?

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Have you actually offered your services to any publishers??? And by your own numbers (24 hours/book) then an individual could be expected to do around 80 books per year (for 8hr day, 5 day week, 48 week year) so say we just look at a million books needing OCR etc, that needs 12,500 man years of work... and there's a lot more books waiting conversion to e-format than that... may not be rocket science but it does require people capable of reading and proofing to do the work and they aren't available at the moment... it's also a mind-numbingly boring job that tends to ruin any enjoyment in the work being dealt with. It's one thing doing a few to get some PD work out in a different form but quite another if you end up doing it full time...

Why didn't you complete you calculation? 48 wks x 40 hours = 1920 hours / 24hrs per book = 80 books x $500 per book = $40,000 a year, work at home. With 4 weeks vacation, and the ability to fine ways to improve your productivity. This would be doom? No commuting, no suits, and you are helping to save the environment? <Shrug>

The real frustrating part is the people who don't want to spend any money to convert these backlist books are the ones screaming the loudest over piracy. "It's not worth anything, but you can't have it." mentality...

[afa]

Originally Posted by BillSmithBooks

There is no debating the point: ebooks do NOT cost as much to produce as ebooks,

I have to disagree here.

I am fully confident that ebooks do cost precisely has much to produce as ebooks.

[elcreative]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Why didn't you complete you calculation? 48 wks x 40 hours = 1920 hours / 24hrs per book = 80 books x $500 per book = $40,000 a year, work at home. With 4 weeks vacation, and the ability to fine ways to improve your productivity. This would be doom? No commuting, no suits, and you are helping to save the environment? <Shrug>

The real frustrating part is the people who don't want to spend any money to convert these backlist books are the ones screaming the loudest over piracy. "It's not worth anything, but you can't have it." mentality...

And who said anything about doom... also love your selective quote ignoring the key point as to numbers of people required and where do they materialise from... or do you want to settle for anyone whether any good or not... oh wait, haven't we got some of that already...

[carld]

Originally Posted by karunaji

This comment says it all.

I won't say what I think of that comment as it would result in hurt feelings and resentment.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by carld

I won't say what I think of that comment as it would result in hurt feelings and resentment.

What is the point of this post?

[carld]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

What is the point of this post?

What's the point of your post?

I was obviously making the point that the linked post really wasn't the final word on the subject as the poster implied. In fact I thought it was pretty childish and stupid, but I decided not to say that directly. I thought the expression of my disapproval of the linked post was clear.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by leebase

Imagine that. Someone can actually dominate a market if only they have enough money to sell a product below wholesale.

Surely there's nothing but good to come from such a practice.

Lee

Ever heard of loss leaders?

Amazon sold a very small selection of books below wholesale (specifically, NYTimes bestsellers). They made the difference up (and then some) on other books not sold below wholesale. Amazon, famously, makes most of its sales from the backlist/long tail. This is not a new strategy; it's a well-worn retail strategy that grocery stores have used for decades.

And my overall point was responding to the contention that agency pricing helped Amazon and that publishers should go back to the wholesale model to get an edge over Amazon - a point that I don't think makes sense given how Amazon had an even greater edge during the pre-Agency period since they were able to compete on price.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by carld

I was obviously making the point that the linked post really wasn't the final word on the subject as the poster implied.

Saying that you think something that would result in hurt feelings if said does not imply anything else than the fact that you are thinking something that would result in hurt feelings if said. It doesn't even clear out if your thoughts would insult karunaji or Anonymous Coward.

Originally Posted by carld

In fact I thought it was pretty childish and stupid, but I decided not to say that directly. I thought the expression of my disapproval of the linked post was clear.

It wasn't clear if you were expressing disapproval of the idea, the language, the way it was presented, the one who posted it, or the one who linked to it.

[carld]

I was expressing disapproval of the linked post, obviously. The fact that it wasn't clear to you about what I thought of the language, presentation and so on really isn't a concern as I wasn't addressing those anyway. I was addressing the basic idea presented in the linked post itself.