All I have is your word of her credentials. This is an internet forum. She could be the former head of every publishing company ever.
So... why are you posting on a board owned and run by someone you don't trust?
All I have is your word of her credentials. This is an internet forum. She could be the former head of every publishing company ever.
All I have is your word of her credentials. This is an internet forum.
Is this true? Is the path of book production manuscript-->print book-->ebook?What’s not being said is how publishers think in terms of “print first,” which raises the cost of e-book production (because you have to convert from a page layout format to a page-flow format). If they thought in terms of “e-book first,” the cost would go WAAAAAAAAAAAY down. The path from Microsoft Word to Adobe InDesign to ePub is circuitous, because you convert from text-flow to page-layout back to text-flow. The path from Microsoft Word to ePub is more of a straight line.
The vast majority of a publisher's costs come from expenses that still exist in an e-book world: Author advances, design, marketing, publicity,office space, and staff.
Emphasis mine. Doesn't this imply that at least part of the cost of an ebook is still tied to supporting a print infrastructure?And even aside from financial considerations, publishers' entire reason for existence is bound up in print. The major publishers are, quite simply, the best companies in the world at getting print books from authors to readers. Most of the tools at their disposal for making a book a hit are tied to a print world, from buying front-of-the-bookstore placement (yes, publishers pay for that) to book tours.
As the exponential growth of e-books has slowed, some publishers are even whispering their hopes that perhaps the rate of e-book adoption will slow further and print will be viable well into the future.
Is this true? Is the path of book production manuscript-->print book-->ebook?
Doesn't this imply that at least part of the cost of an ebook is still tied to supporting a print infrastructure?
Yeah, 11-22-63 costs $35.00 in a bookstore, so the ebook is vastly cheaper. And yes, I was speaking of hardcover and since every hardcover I looked at was in a range of about 40 - 50% more expensive than the ebook version, I'm thinking the outrage over ebook prices might be just a little overstated.Problem, I'm not even sure how it's possible since the cost differential is only 10%.
Prices have been all over the place since the DoJ hammer came down. And of course that 50% ebook discount doesn't translate to other formats than hardcover.
The book is not the container; the book is the contents.
Well, not exactly. It can be, especially for older releases, which can be a nightmare because of problems with old files and OCR.
I mentioned the file fork: it's a fork in the workflow at the point where you have proofed galleys, when the book is finalized in terms of all the text, including the frontmatter and the index, and captions as well as the body text, the book exists in something like InDesign, or Quark Express or even Framemaker.
No, the story is the contests. The book is the whole package.
If it was just the contents, then I wouldn't have several different Shakespeare on my shelf, all packaged differently. I wouldn't have a whole shelf of Robert E. Howard, many have the same contests, the same stories, but the packaging is different.
For me, if it was just content, I could see going with eBooks, but I collect the whole package. I like having them on display. And I like paging through them.
No, the story is the contests. The book is the whole package.
If it was just the contents, then I wouldn't have several different Shakespeare on my shelf, all packaged differently.
I'm not sure I chose the right wording for my question. If I didn't, I apologize. I should have asked "is the path 'text-flow to page-layout back to text-flow'?" I'm genuinely asking because I really don't know.
Look over the numbers I provided in the other thread. None of those were ever refuted, because they're accurate. Going digital you don't have the cost of physical printing, you have less of a distribution cut taken out (30% from the highest digital distro, Apple; 65% from most print distros), you have no shipping & warehousing costs, and you have no taxes on stock. Yet, ebooks "cost" nearly the same as print books, and people still in the industry will say it's anything except what it is, grabbing for more profit. Again, I think the industry needs to earn more. They more than deserve it. But the math doesn't lie.
Originally Posted by Cliffhanger
Look over the numbers I provided in the other thread. None of those were ever refuted, because they're accurate. Going digital you don't have the cost of physical printing, you have less of a distribution cut taken out (30% from the highest digital distro, Apple; 65% from most print distros), you have no shipping & warehousing costs, and you have no taxes on stock. Yet, ebooks "cost" nearly the same as print books, and people still in the industry will say it's anything except what it is, grabbing for more profit. Again, I think the industry needs to earn more. They more than deserve it. But the math doesn't lie.
Most of the other items have been addressed, but, as to the section I've bolded?
Speaking as the manager of a server farm that includes webservers, DNS servers, database servers, file servers and several other utility servers, both hardware and virtually based, the statement in bold is absolutely untrue. Whether the product is sitting in a box in a warehouse or a server in a rack, there is still storage and delivery costs. Might not be as much (and I would love to see a legitimate comparison), but it IS still there.
A publisher produces a book in multiple formats. If the publisher chooses to amortize the costs over all sales irrespective of format, the costs of digital and physical formats of the same book are the same.I know the costs involved in printing books, and I know the costs involved in digital books. The claim that digital books are nearly as expensive as print is simply wrong.
Actually, in a sense, I did buy it for the cardboard and paper because, as I said, I can hold it, put it on display, and thumb through it. As a collector, digital versions just don't cut it.But you bought them for the Shakespeare, right? Not because you wanted some cardboard and paper. You wanted the contents. The other is just packaging of the contents.
Just curious. Are all those versions available as eBooks? I know I've Googled an eBook version of The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare: The Complete Works Annotated, but can't find it. But I fully admit my Google-fu isn't very good.Dude, the contents of those books isn't the same.
Two editions of the same play aren't the same. The contents are different.
The editor and edition make so much difference that I can refer to first folio vs. Johnson, vs, Coleridge, vs. Rouse vs. Braunmuller vs. Taylor with respect to editions of Macbeth, and other Shakepeare lovers will know exactly what books I'm referring to because the contents are all different.
It's not a question of resumes, but math. She's citing sources that don't actually support her position and ignoring the basic math.
A publisher produces a book in multiple formats. If the publisher chooses to amortize the costs over all sales irrespective of format, the costs of digital and physical formats of the same book are the same.
Directly comparing digital to print in so far as the actual difference in cost involved in bringing a book to market in either format are possible, have been done, and show a wildly cheaper avenue in digital only production.
You're the one who brought up resumes/credentials.
Stlight's whole post, but especially this. By insisting that the production of ebooks is cheaper and that the cost to the consumer should be so much less than a print product, it sounds to me as if that position holds my work as an editor on that book - and everyone else who's worked on it, including the author - in lesser value because of the format in which it's distributed, despite the "fork" that Medievalist mentioned, which doesn't happen until late in the process.Why shouldn't the ebooks bear their share of the fixed costs to produce the book in any form? What makes them so special that they get a free ride?
Where publishers put out print and ebooks, if the print book didn't exist there would be no ebook.
For epublishers all costs must be spread over the ebooks. .