Is piracy likely to harm ebook sales?

[random50]

Originally Posted by djgreedo

I think you're dramatically underestimating the costs to the publisher and probably overestimating how much return they are likely to get from the ebook version (in the short term, which is all the shareholders care about).

Firstly, a publisher isn't going to hire a bored college student to do this work. Believe it or not they would hire professionals who would be getting paid a lot more than $10 per hour. On top of that hourly rate there are taxes, etc. You cost your employer a lot more than whatever your hourly rate is. And there will probably be at least 2 rounds of proofreading on the manuscript. And someone will need to format the ebook to the desired format(s) - again professionally.

I think several thousand dollars is a conservative estimate for getting a book into ebook format if the book wasn't already in electronic format.

When the publisher sells that ebook, some of the 'cover price' is going towards overheads, royalties, the retailer, etc. To recover the costs of creating an ebook they may have to sell hundreds or even thousands of copies. And ebook sales are still a tiny fraction of the book market.

Believe it or not? I don't believe it, and with excellent reason. Instead of speculating about what they *would* do, why not just look at what many of them *are* doing? There is nothing remotely professional about the quality produced by some publishers. It is a simple scan and dump job with literally no proofreading. If you doubt this, consider the fact that I have one *series* of books in which one of the central character's name is incorrect, in a very obvious way, roughly 80% of the time throughout 7 titles, another 2 book series with exactly the same issue, though less frequently occuring, and a third which, when originally released, just cut off mid sentence about 10 pages from the end. Three different publishers.

This doesn't cost thousands. Actually, even $100s may be an overestimate. I can scan a book using our work photocopier in minutes - remove the binding then feed the whole lot in at once - so I'd be surprised if there aren't more sophisticated and task specific machines available that would do the same, and more reliably. Labour costs should be minimal given this is unskilled work.

Yes, the quality will be poor, but a poor option is better than no option.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Perhaps because people who make ludicrous assertions such as "ebooks cost virtually nothing to produce" clearly know absolutely nothing about book publishing. The majority of the cost of publishing a book comes from such things as copy editing. This has to be done for an eBook just as much as for a paper book. If you honestly believe that copy editors work for free, I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken.

Like many other products. there are Development costs and there are Manufacturing costs.(I am leaving out Marketing/Hype costs which vary widely )
I work in electronics.
4+ engineers spent almost 1 year developing and testing the circuit, software for a device that costs just $30 to manufacture in large numbers. (cost is not the retail price)
With e-books, the reader has to buy expensive specialty hardware/software to read the book. With print books, no additional equipment is needed.

Let me propose the reasoning that the real Pirates were the Publishers that have been consistently cheating the Authors on the number of copies sold through the mechanism of "return hold backs".

With e-books, the sales numbers are hard numbers that can not be fudged. In order to keep their revenue stream intact and pay the Author their due, they had to raise prices.
This even in the light of almost nil manufacturing costs (now just a server farm that serves the entire catalog).

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by BooksForABuck

ultimately we need readers to pay if we want to keep authors and publishers in business.
Publisher, www.BoksForABuck.com

How many people pay for their Google searches?

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

I can understand paying more of a premium for brand new material when it comes out, then later a reduction in price to equal most "fairly recent" (1-5 year old) material. I wouldn't have a problem paying for backlist at a significant discount of the cost of "fairly recent" books... but it wouldn't have to be "super-low." Say, 33-50% of the cost of 1-5-year old books, and possibly variable upon the popularity of the book. I agree, I see no reason to essentially "give away" backlist, just because they're old.

Since nobody outside the second hand market is making anything from the sale of those old books, I would have thought any price they could get for them as ebooks would be a bonus.

[Scott Nicholson]

I don't understand the reasoning that an author needs to make as much on an ebook, when the reality is they will sell many more times the number of ebooks over the life of the format (which, presumably, is the period of your copyright, extending past our deaths). I am making more per copy selling $1.99 ebooks than at $7 paperback through a major publisher, plus I will make far more than I ever would off a traditional print book that will only be available for a certain amount of time (a year or two at best). That changes with POD, of course, but the audience for a $15 trade paperback and a $2-$5 e-book are entirely different. I'm putting my bets on the $2-$3 ebook. Plus, Amazon is raising its royalty rates to 70 percent in July.

As for piracy, sure, it will happen, but I can never call it a "good thing," no matter the justification. Nobody would steal a Ford and then say they were advertising and "helping" the Ford brand by driving it around on the street.

Scott

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

But publishers aren't in business to make ebooks work. They're in business to make money. Spending lots of money now on temp workers to convert a massive back catalogue is a good route to bankruptcy.

Not that back catalogue isn't important! But I think that they can't afford a crash program.

They could use the fan-made versions. Most of those will be better proof read than anything they have e-published themselves.

[kad032000]

Originally Posted by Scott Nicholson

As for piracy, sure, it will happen, but I can never call it a "good thing," no matter the justification. Nobody would steal a Ford and then say they were advertising and "helping" the Ford brand by driving it around on the street.

Off topic, but if I could duplicate a Ford, and drive it around in a manner that it would be seen by a virtually unlimited amount of people, particularly in places where people typically don't have access to Ford, who could all test drive it (simultaneously) if they wanted, you'd better believe people would claim it was advertising and helpful to Ford.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by theducks

With e-books, the sales numbers are hard numbers that can not be fudged. In order to keep their revenue stream intact and pay the Author their due, they had to raise prices.
This even in the light of almost nil manufacturing costs (now just a server farm that serves the entire catalog).

Yea, they "had" to raise the price to the customer so they could ...er... cut the author's share. Wait what? Oh right, sorry, your argument flails.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by Scott Nicholson

As for piracy, sure, it will happen, but I can never call it a "good thing," no matter the justification. Nobody would steal a Ford and then say they were advertising and "helping" the Ford brand by driving it around on the street.

Of course not, but stealing a Ford has nothing in common with piracy.

[DawnFalcon]

...Bearing in mind that if they drive it around and then leave it, that's TWOC and not theft.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by djgreedo

I think you're dramatically underestimating the costs to the publisher and probably overestimating how much return they are likely to get from the ebook version (in the short term, which is all the shareholders care about).

Shareholders' concern for short-term stock prices is crippling if not destroying American business. But that's a totally different rant.

Firstly, a publisher isn't going to hire a bored college student to do this work.

No, they're probably not. But they should be.

Believe it or not they would hire professionals who would be getting paid a lot more than $10 per hour.

Yeah, they probably would. That doesn't mean it's what they should be doing. Look at the PG Distributed Proofreading project. Anyone can sign up and help proofread their scans of public-domain books. Not professionals, just the average Joe. Books that have been through PGDP are of significantly higher quality than most ebooks scanned/OCR'd by commercial publishers. It would appear that proofreading does not demand exotic and expensive skills, just an attention to detail: does this look like that? Hell, they could outsource it to China for that matter. You don't even need to know English to see if this looks like that.

I think several thousand dollars is a conservative estimate for getting a book into ebook format if the book wasn't already in electronic format.

Your estimate of the cost being more reliable than mine because ... ?

When the publisher sells that ebook, some of the 'cover price' is going towards overheads, royalties, the retailer, etc. To recover the costs of creating an ebook they may have to sell hundreds or even thousands of copies. And ebook sales are still a tiny fraction of the book market.

Royalties: 15% of cover on a good day. Overhead: bandwidth, which compared to how much they waste on unnecessary glitz on their websites, is trivial. Retailer: that would be themselves. Slap it up on the website and sell it.

If, to be hugely conservative, they sell an ebook for $5, and give the author $1 for it, just to keep the numbers round, selling only 50 ebooks would provide $1000 in gross revenue. That would pay for the conversion right there, with money left over for donuts for the office.

Scanning, OCRing, proofreading, and formatting books is not some esoteric skill that requires years of training and experience. It's something done by volunteers the world over, many of them people right here in these forums. It's something you can get college students to do for minimum wage, or random people on the Web for that matter. We're already doing it.

Ebook sales are a small part of the book market because of a number of factors:

• high prices
• poor quality
• DRM
• the cost of reading devices
• backlist availablity

Selling more and better ebooks cheaper will alleviate three of those. Doing away with DRM (which has been successful for Baen, as an example) will remove another. More ebooks available will increase the demand for ebook readers, which will potentially lower the device cost, thereby (along with the availability of desired books) will increase device sales. More people with ebook readers means more demand for ebooks.

There's a market out there. There's a potentially huge market. The publishers need to focus on creating and expanding that market, not stifling it.

[Iphinome]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

If, to be hugely conservative, they sell an ebook for $5, and give the author $1 for it, just to keep the numbers round, selling only 50 ebooks would provide $1000 in gross revenue. That would pay for the conversion right there, with money left over for donuts for the office.

$5 *$50 = $250

[Worldwalker]

$4 x 500 = $1000. I slipped a decimal place somewhere.

(the other $1 per book is royalties)

There is clearly too much blood in my caffeinestream today.

[DJHARKAVY]

Originally Posted by djgreedo

Firstly, a publisher isn't going to hire a bored college student to do this work. Believe it or not they would hire professionals who would be getting paid a lot more than $10 per hour. On top of that hourly rate there are taxes, etc. You cost your employer a lot more than whatever your hourly rate is.

Freelancers.
Freelancers get $1-2/page (fiction publishers usually pay lower than others) and do not get benefits.

Originally Posted by djgreedo

And someone will need to format the ebook to the desired format(s) - again professionally.

Once it is proofed and set, it is easy to format to desired formats.