02-02-2009, 12:32 PM | #31 |
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You know, a CEO is hired to set strategy for 5-10 years into the future. Obviously, this one is not succeeding at the task. He confuses one time charges with continuing costs. I really would like to know what company he is CEO of, it will make a great short over the next few years...
I would like to ask this CEO, how did Project Gutenberg get to where it is, with 27,000 separate downloads available, for free, funded by volunteers? (I am a contributor to the public domain, both by scanning/OCRing public domain texts and writing new texts directly released into the public domain.) Or look at the downloads available on MobileRead. If it weren't for the continual extentions of the Berne convention, these sources would be much bigger. It's real and it's there. You should give it a look and see what your "Free Market" competitors are capable of doing. Note: these are legal Public Domain e-books, not darknet pirated editions still under copyright. But those exist also. This is capitalistic "Creative Destruction" at it's finest. You only choice is adapt or die. Frankly, I'm betting in your companies' case on the latter. Ralph Sir Edward |
02-02-2009, 12:33 PM | #32 |
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Here in Russia, typical eBook price (they're all DRM-free) is more or less $1 (1/10th of the actual hardcover book).
Sometimes there's actually sales, and everybody is happy. Moreover, in our stores I've seen most accurate and well-formed eBooks ever (correct multi-level ToC, big covers, embedded illustrations). And most times you pay once and get eBook in any format you want (epub, mobipocket, html, rtf, pdf, fb2, palmdoc, etc) - e.g., I am usually download epub and pdf versions, all free of additional charges. So I must say, that maybe Mr. Michael Justus must look closer to publishing process and do not build wild theories. Last edited by 13xforever; 02-02-2009 at 12:51 PM. Reason: added absolute eBook cost |
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02-02-2009, 12:34 PM | #33 | |
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http://www.fischerverlage.de/ |
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02-02-2009, 12:38 PM | #34 | |
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A universal format isn't what's stopping publishers; they're just terrified of not correctly identifying the format their target demographic uses. Technophobia... they don't even know how to frame the questions to start the research to find out which format is better-suited for their books. They're very much not used to thinking about "what tech devices do our customers have & use?" Book publishers (I believe) don't research their customers' choice of lamps or mass transit use to decide which books should be hardcover or paperback; they're not expecting to think about "do we market this to a business commuter crowd reading on PDAs, or a leisure crowd with dedicated ebook readers? Or students reading on laptops? Do they use Windows or MacOS or Linux?" It's not that these are impossible questions or that companies can't find their customers' demographics--software companies ask these questions all the time. It's that book publishers have believed--and until recently, it's been true--that the technology level & methods of their customers was fairly irrelevant to them. And they want it to continue that way. |
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02-02-2009, 12:39 PM | #35 | |
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Last edited by phenomshel; 02-02-2009 at 12:40 PM. Reason: to add syntax |
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02-02-2009, 12:43 PM | #36 |
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I agree with most everyone here that there seems like a one time cost to setup the infrastructure for delivering e-book contents. But I think after the infrastructure is setup, the cost of actually maintaining an e-book delivery service would be less. You cut out the need for having to do business with retail stores, storage space and shipping.
I guess it depends on how much it costs to hire tech support and tech people to operate and maintain the infrastructure. I think the question I have, does the publishing industry really want to go digital. Right now, I think there is a premium price assocated with hardback versus paperback books and publishers gain some revenue with hardback editions. Can't see them doing the same for electronic versions, so they probably have to come up with a different model to make up that money. Perhaps offer editions with extra content for a higher price? |
02-02-2009, 12:46 PM | #37 | |
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02-02-2009, 12:56 PM | #38 |
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Guys like this make baby Gutenberg cry.
-MJ |
02-02-2009, 01:26 PM | #39 |
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I did leave a comment for Dana Stabenow at her blog, and was fortunate to receive an almost immediate reply. Her answer to my question about when digital becomes paper was this:
"2.Dana Posted February 2, 2009 at 10:55 am | Permalink I don’t know. No, I’m not being cute, I really don’t know. I send the book in as a Word .doc attached to an email and a year later a physical book shows up on my doorstep courtesy of UPS." I invited her to check out this discussion. |
02-02-2009, 01:51 PM | #40 | |
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02-02-2009, 02:16 PM | #41 |
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costs
Let us not forget that the publisher is not substituting a server for a warehouse. He is in the business of publishing and so needs that warehouse. Where his reasoning is faulty is in believing that an e-book sale results in a loss of paper book sales. Eric Flint has stated that his p-book sales go up from every free book he puts out. He clearly and I think correctly states that an author's biggest fear is obscurity, not piracy. I had never heard of Steve Jordan until I read his freebie, and now I have purchased his whole (not very big) library. Those who suffer from mental myopia are doomed to obscurity.
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02-02-2009, 02:30 PM | #42 | |
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As for producing books, if they mandate the style in which manuscripts are submitted and released from the editing process that will fix a lot of the problem. I was in a liberal arts field in university and we had style guides. I'm a programmer now and we have style guides. This is not rocket science. We also have versioning control. It's free. They need to simplify. |
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02-02-2009, 02:33 PM | #43 |
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The positive side of this is that I think we will see a higher growth in independent publishers (those who sell ebooks). I think it'll begin a domino effect that will topple a lot of big publishers.
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02-02-2009, 02:45 PM | #44 | |
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And the process between "Receive Word doc" (or similar) and "print paper" involves some conversion--fonts, paragraph settings, layout, swirly pictures at chapter breaks, and so on. The process between "Word doc" and "proper ebook" (lit, mobi, epub, ereader for the most part) is a different conversion--it has to create metadata, a digital table of contents, page breaks by chapters, and so on. They could auto-convert to basic text, or to "text + bold & italics," but more than that takes formatting time. Also, it gets more complex when there are pictures involved. I believe It's no harder than setup for print--but it's <i>different</i>. And while a good XML markup could work for both, most publishers haven't yet figured that out. (And it does take both technical awareness & real time/money resources to set up to do on a large scale--they first have to be convinced it's worth the investment.) However... even with all those setbacks, the people here are aware that "convert well-formatted document to good ebook" can be as little as a few minutes, perhaps a couple of hours if it's very complex. (Dictionaries are complex.) Most of the extra time involved in book conversion is fixing formatting problems or typos/OCR errors. The idea that a publishing house can't afford to spend ~2 hours per ebook (let's assume some time for metadata & other weirdness) in order to release an edition that costs no storage fees and has no return from the distributors is insane. |
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02-02-2009, 02:51 PM | #45 |
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Like most industries, the management is overly concerned with numbers. For them it may well come to a make or buy decision -- do we build our own systems or simply buy a small successful operation. More often than not the "buy" decision is the less expensive one.
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