01-08-2009, 04:11 AM | #31 | |
Zealot
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Still, as already said, there are other costs related exclusively to printed editons. Regards Nelson |
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01-08-2009, 04:16 AM | #32 | |
Zealot
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Regards Nelson |
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01-08-2009, 09:16 AM | #33 | |
Guru
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Ah, thanks. I was continually looking at the delta costs being minimal. But right, the cleanup work has to be charged to all editions evenly. But once the fork is done (real pulp to typesetting, eBook directly to eStore?), except for marketing, it seems the costs shouldn't be shared. I fully expected very low eBook prices, since I imagined that that the majority of the costs of the physical book were for after-printing sales and distribution. Shelf space and shipping and retail sales *require* a high retail markup for physical books. Though again, I may be missing something or over-exaggerating the physical distribution and retail costs (Software stores take a ridiculous cut, but who knows why?). Just one uninformed person's expectations. |
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01-08-2009, 09:26 AM | #34 | |
Literacy = Understanding
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I asked for the Reader because I liked the portability and because for me there are two categories of books: (1) books that I want to add to my library, my permanent collection, and (2) those that I want to read but do not want to add to my library. Naively, I assumed that ebooks would be less expensive than pbooks, when the truth is that because of DRM ebooks are signifcantly more expensive than pbooks. However, I do buy ebooks but with caution. That is, I will not buy a fiction ebook unless I am already familiar with the author and like the author; or the description is intriguing and the ebook, even with DRM, costs less than $6; or the ebook is free. Today is a good example. I had never read anything by Fiona McIntosh but HarperCollins gave away Odalisque and yesterday I finally got around to reading it. I found it so good, that I finished it in 1 day and this morning bought from the Sony store volumes 2 and 3 of the series, which I will start shortly. I would never have bought any of McIntosh's books absent that free one because of DRM and pricing. So there is some connection between buying a reading device and expecting to spend less on ebooks -- at least for me -- but only because of DRM. Absent DRM, knowing that I own the ebook like I own a pbook, then equivalent pricing would be less a problem, althoug I would expect the pricing to be equivalent to the paperback version, not the hardcover version. |
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01-08-2009, 12:30 PM | #35 | ||
Grand Sorcerer
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Conversion of raw text to ebook takes substantial time and effort for individuals because they're working with, well, raw text. Publishers aren't--they're working, at some point, with print-ready text, with whatever style & formatting arrangements work for them. They have a steady flow of books formatted with the same processes. If nothing else, I have trouble believing that making PDFs of all their books would take any substantial time per book. However, even if an ebook requires starting from scratch, from the same base manuscript sent to the publisher, it doesn't take more effort than making a pbook. Quote:
Charging the same for both implies that those costs are negligible or non-existent. Charging *more* for ebooks than paperbacks implies that either paper costs less than creating hyperlinks, or that publishers want to discourage ebook sales. |
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01-08-2009, 01:12 PM | #36 | |||
Jeffrey A. Carver
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Tor just in the last couple of years started keeping PDF archive files of their books. That, in fact, is what I put up for free for my Sunborn download. But it's a poor starting point for an ebook. Actually a terrible starting point. I tried to use it and gave up. Quote:
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Having said that, I agree completely that ebooks should not cost more than treebooks. I have argued in favor of lower prices on my own ebooks. I'm hoping some of them will be up on Baen soon, so they'll be available for a lower price. I am completely in favor of lower costs for ebooks. I'd rather sell 1000 copies for a low profit than 100 for a high profit. I'm just saying it's not as simple as many folk seem to believe. Side note: One area where I might agree with the cynical view is in textbooks. Clearly an area where ebooks could be of enormous benefit to the user, the student. But my brother is a textbook author, and he says his publisher simply doesn't know what to do about it, and they are, indeed, running scared. |
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01-08-2009, 01:22 PM | #37 | |
Grand Sorcerer
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01-08-2009, 01:45 PM | #38 | |
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Dale |
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01-08-2009, 01:50 PM | #39 | |
Grand Sorcerer
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Dale |
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01-08-2009, 02:05 PM | #40 | |
Wizard
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kaz |
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01-08-2009, 02:28 PM | #41 |
Wizard
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Preparing manuscript for a publishing as an e-book can be *very* quick ...
... once you have done all that intensive work needed to prepare manuscript for your in-house format for p-book publishing. And this is what people are referring to. We have been talking about selling an e-book for higher price than paperback or, in some cases, even a fancy hardback. The work for preparation the manuscript to a publishable format is the same, yet with hardback you have many significant additional costs: - paper, - printing, - transport, - warehousing, - costs for running a brick and mortar store (rent, salaries, heating, ...) - buying back unsold books from brick and mortar stores and many others. With e-book the additional costs are: - rent for a server somewhere in your ISP server room (you would be surprised how cheap you can get that) - price of some e-commerce software (you only need to pay this once and than you can sell virtually unlimited number of books. Here again you can get the basic functionality *very* cheap (**)) - salary of an administrator[s] and OPTIONALLY - license fees for whatever non-in-house DRM you might want to use - maintenance fees for DRM authorization server after you stop selling the books. Here you can, of course, do what the vast majority of sellers of DRM hobbled content do when they stop selling. You can switch off the server immediately, leaving your sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers with unusable content. (**) do not get me started about the Sony book store and their basic functionality - like searching for a book |
01-08-2009, 03:13 PM | #42 |
Evangelist
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Most of the books I'd like to read were released some time ago (not considered classics through) and they have run on best seller lists for weeks on end when people were purchasing the paper books at stores and online. My belief about those books is that the costs have been incurred and paid for by the bestseller prices long before they are converted to eBooks.
Most of the time after a book has run its course on the best seller lists, the price of the paper book goes way down. At that point, I expect the eBook price to be reasonably below the paper price, since I think any dollars that come in from the sale of eBooks for those kinds of books is gravy (well, after the publisher or distributor pays the DRM costs). For those kinds of books, my belief is that the primary cost for eBooks is DRM costs. Now if a publishing company's business is purely focused on eBooks, then I'd expect to pay more for those books because there are still the usual formatting, layout, etc costs of creating a book, but for a publishing company who is primarily focused on paper books, I don't think the costs for eBooks should be the same as for paper books, especially when I consider the constraints associated with eBooks (DRM, not able to share books or donate books, etc.). |
01-08-2009, 03:29 PM | #43 |
Somewhat clueless
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I'm sure it's not, yet several members of this forum (you know who you are!) are able to produce utterly gorgeous ebooks from various unformatted texts at a spectacular rate. Why is it so much harder for the trade to do this?
/JB |
01-08-2009, 04:16 PM | #44 | |
Books and more books
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So it comes to utility/value of format and I think that e-books are much more disposable than mmpb's. Regarding utility, it's trickier since for example I'd rather have an ebook than a print book for many books, so I place some utility on having e, but then you need differential pricing to include the utility preference of each person. So overall, if e-books move toward a uniform pricing system, format based the way mmpb/tpb/hdc tiers function now there is no question that e-books should go somewhat lower than mmpb's, maybe with the same restrictions, like second editions if hc is released... Personally though I think that digital allows much more flexible pricing and a reverse auction kind of system is doable - the way the used book market acts today in practice. Hard to say if it's socially practical though since the market kind of ingrained us with "new - fixed price with possible discounts", "used - variable pricing"... Let's see how Apple will do with their differential pricing... |
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01-08-2009, 05:08 PM | #45 |
Wizard
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"I don’t mind one bit paying a FAIR price. But I am not a complete fool and willing to pay 20 dollars for a book that is available on the high street for 10 dollars."
This, to me, is the bottom line. The publishers are *crazy* if they think people will want to pay more money when they don't have to. If the costs to produce an ebook are really that much higher, then they need to economize and find cheaper ways (e.g. cutting out the middleman, requesting authors to submit manuscripts in plain text, whatever). They need to develop methods which will allow them to price their product in a competitive way. |
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