Exactly. Unless something changes I won't be finishing the story because I just feel like I'm getting taken advantage of with the jacked up price.
Venting about ebooks
- Thread starter Flogiston
- Start date
Exactly. Unless something changes I won't be finishing the story because I just feel like I'm getting taken advantage of with the jacked up price.
Here's a timely article (part 1 of 2) discussing the factors that go into setting the price of e-books:
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/are-publishers-making-a-killing-on-e-books-part-1/
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/are-publishers-making-a-killing-on-e-books-part-1/
....
But Chris, most of those are costs already incurred in producing the PRINTED work. So why, exactly, should that be jacking the ebook price up?
But Chris, most of those are costs already incurred in producing the PRINTED work. So why, exactly, should that be jacking the ebook price up?
Here's the thing, S&S was pricing Star Trek eBooks lower then they are now before they went agency. What was different before agency and after? NOTHING! So there's no economical reason for raising prices like that. What S&S (along with others) was trying to do was to stop Amazon from discounting eBooks lower then other shops so that because prices would be the same at all shops, people would hopefully shop elsewhere. S&S (and others) felt that Amazon was eating into hardcover book sales by discounting the popular eBooks at $9.99 when the hardcovers were at least double.
I was just organizing my SCE e-books in Calibre (a long put-off chore) and was considering buying the older ones that I have in paperback (from before I had an e-reader); I was shocked to see how the cost of the individual books had increased; indeed, some of the ones I already have are twice the price I originally paid!
I'm just gonna hope that one day agency pricing will end and the price will go down and/or will accept coupons.
I'm not taking a side or offering a specific argument; I just thought that people sincerely interested in understanding the process of e-book pricing could benefit from the information that article contained, as a backgrounder if nothing more. And keep in mind that it's only the first half of the article. I don't know if there will be information in part 2 that addresses your question, but the author hasn't yet said everything he has to say.
I totally agree, especially for new releases, where it should be easy to get the digital copy of the final proofread copy of the book. But what makes it worse is how ebook prices rarely, if ever, go below the initial price. Hell, Steam has proven how cutting prices on digital games can increase sales, so why not apply that to ebooks, especially copies of older works that have been in the market for years?
Part 2 is also up.
Well, read the article. Those elements are actually a very small percentage of the total expense and labor that goes into creating a book, so they're not the primary factors in setting its price. Due to economies of scale, the cost of printing and shipping a book in large quantities is only pennies per book. Most of what you're paying for, whether for a physical book or an e-book, is the labor and person-hours that go into its writing, editing, copyediting, typesetting, cover design and art, marketing, publicity, etc.
And as part 2 of the article points out, the sellers of a book take a percentage of its profits as a commission, and that's just as true for e-book vendors as it is for physical bookstores. An e-book vendor is still a business that needs to make a profit, and so that's part of what you're paying for.
True, but they're taking a much smaller percentage of S&S's ebook sales than their print sales (30% of list price, vs. 40-50% of list price).
I wouldn't be nearly as put out about ebook prices if the publishers still allowed vendors to offer discounts. But S&S suddenly decided to grab a bigger cut of the pie, and to deny vendors the ability to run sales, etc., and didn't lower prices to compensate. There's no good reason why the print versions should be available for cheaper than the ebook versions.
^Didn't someone say above that that was a defensive move against Amazon.com's attempt to undercut everyone else's prices in a grab to monopolize the market?
I think that was the legal argument for getting all the publishers to switch over to the agency model. There's nothing preventing any vendor from lowering prices to match Amazon's, although that would mean the publishers would get less of a cut. Hell, if you follow Diane Duane on Twitter, she keeps recommending an e-book site that regularly has sales on its e-books, so it's not as if some vendors don't do it. The publishers are just worried about the big two - Amazon and iTunes - because that's where most of the money is.
I can identify with the writer of the article, since I do wedding videos, business commercials, and even transfers of people's family memories that they have on Hi8 or VHS-C to DVD.
With the Hi8/VHS-C transfer, a lot of people seem to think that it should cost $5 or less too transfer one 2-hour tape, but when I add in all my costs and try to make a profit, I've had a lot of people ask me why I "jack" my price for a 2-hour tape up to $30 (I charge $15 per video hour, and there is no way that I can go lower than that, and there's no way, if someone brings in a T-200 VHS tape that has 10 hours of family memories on it in SLP mode that I'm going to be doing the whole tape for $15, since that wouldn't even begin to cover my costs for the DVD-R's needed and the DVD cases that they come in; not too mention but if someone didn't want a DVD but a Digital File of their tapes, I still charge $15 an hour, even though the DVD and Case have been taken out of the equation, and even then their bill is some times more because they don't have the necessary USB key or hard drive, at which point I have to purchase and then charge them the cost for the key/hard drive).
If I was transferring tapes that were going to be sold in the millions, then, yeah, I could probably offer the DVD's for just $5, like you see in the bins at Wal-mart and other stores. But when it is such a small amount, there is no way that I could stay in business like that. So I do understand why Simon & Schuster and the other ebook publishers tend too set the prices at the same level as the regular printed books.
With the Hi8/VHS-C transfer, a lot of people seem to think that it should cost $5 or less too transfer one 2-hour tape, but when I add in all my costs and try to make a profit, I've had a lot of people ask me why I "jack" my price for a 2-hour tape up to $30 (I charge $15 per video hour, and there is no way that I can go lower than that, and there's no way, if someone brings in a T-200 VHS tape that has 10 hours of family memories on it in SLP mode that I'm going to be doing the whole tape for $15, since that wouldn't even begin to cover my costs for the DVD-R's needed and the DVD cases that they come in; not too mention but if someone didn't want a DVD but a Digital File of their tapes, I still charge $15 an hour, even though the DVD and Case have been taken out of the equation, and even then their bill is some times more because they don't have the necessary USB key or hard drive, at which point I have to purchase and then charge them the cost for the key/hard drive).
If I was transferring tapes that were going to be sold in the millions, then, yeah, I could probably offer the DVD's for just $5, like you see in the bins at Wal-mart and other stores. But when it is such a small amount, there is no way that I could stay in business like that. So I do understand why Simon & Schuster and the other ebook publishers tend too set the prices at the same level as the regular printed books.
^Right. Like I said, there's an economy of scale to consider. The bigger the quantities something sells in, the lower the price can be for each unit. But for something that sells in lower quantities -- which is still somewhat the case with Trek e-books -- it's not practical to discount the price as much.
There was some sort of lawsuit a while back that forced the price of eBooks by amazon to go up. It had something to do with the publishing companies not wanting eBooks to undercut their paperback sales.
I don't have a link, I forgot where I found that article, and it was months ago. There is a possibility I misunderstood the article though. Like, maybe it wasn't amazon that was sued, or court restricted to do something, but one of the many technical things like the license offered by Adobe for their PDF format, or some crap like that.
Anyhow, regarding the link that Christopher put up:
I take issue with this statement "But you also have overhead expenses to meet such as rent or mortgage, utility bills, transportation, computer equipment, depreciation and countless other necessities and amenities."
There is no overhead in writing a book (not unless you consider the cost of advertizing).
Writing a book is free. To claim you have cost of labor because you must pay your rent, buy food, and the like, is as absurd as claiming it is the cost of masturbating. Hey, it takes time, and time is money, because living isn't free.
Then there's this "The first task we perform to reissue a previously published book is to accurately reproduce the printed text as a digital file. Even if you possess the original text file, for publication purposes it’s useless. The text you turned in to your publisher was subsequently copyedited and proofread. You may want to key into your computer the changes that your publisher made to your original text file. That will probably take you a minimum of a week – 40 hours. If your hourly cost is $40.00 that’s $1,600.00, a foolish expenditure when it is so much cheaper to have your printed edition scanned."
What? We're talking about eBooks, right? You need to do your own proof reading and editing. Gone are the days of musicians who can rock out on the guitar, but have no idea how to press the "record" button and adjust volume and compression on individual tracks. Today musicians play their instruments (often multiple instruments) and do their own recording, mixing, distribution. Writers need to do their proof reading and editing.
But let me get into the real WTF moment of this paragraph. What is this about it's cheaper to scan your printed version, than to convert a .txt file into a .pdf file? Am I misunderstanding something? Cost of transforming txt or doc into pdf= free
Look, maybe because I am not a professional writer, I am speaking out of pure ignorance and sticking my foot in my mouth. But the cost of publishing an eBook is free. Here's what you do:
1. Write the book on your computer (the thing you bought to google porn with).
2. Read over it, get at least one friend to read it. Hammer out the dents in the story, make it flow better, fix the typos, save as PDF.
3. Establish copyrights and the ISBN number (I have no idea how this is done).
4. Learn basic HTML (one week of study, it's free).
5. Get a domain name ($10 a year) and a host ($7 a month).
6. Build a simple website advertizing and promoting your book, copy&paste some excerpts from the book, fill your website with advertizing so you make your $7 a month to cover hosting, upload the pdf, configure the download link to require a unique password that is generated when customer pays with credit card (I don't know how to do this, but I'm sure if you go to a computer tech forum and ask, they'll give you the php script to copy paste into your website).
Done.
Sure you might want to get your book on a big time seller like Barns and Noble, and Amazon, but this is the equivalent of saying "I don't want to play my music at stinkin' night clubs man, I want to jam at Carnegie Hall".
The point I am trying to make is that being a writer, back in the pre internet day, was really tough. Once upon a time you had to write, edit, and all that jazz, then have a clergymen painstakingly copy word for word everything in your book, writing it all down with a feather quill i.e. books were expensive things.
Then came the print press! Well now a book that might never see more than a hundred copies could be made into millions of copies in no time. The price of books went down because the cost of manufacturing them went down.
Furthermore, they were still physical things which means they had to go to a store, which means there had to be a distributor. Next, the people that bought the books were store owners, not customers. Customers offered profits to the store owner, not the writer or publisher. Speaking of publisher, if any store was going to buy a bulk of your books, a publisher had to muscle them into doing it. Publishers were picky and wanted big bucks.
Today, production of a book is free. No paper, no presses, no ink! Billions of copies can be made instantly on demand forever and ever.
And, we just cut out a ton of middlemen.
You can't tell me the cost today is greater than the cost of doing it yesterday. We need no physical resources, and we don't need middle men, how the hell does the cost go up?
As for that nonsense about the worth of your time; that cannot be taken into account, because regardless of whether you ever write a book, you have to pay for those things.
Furthermore, it is truly ignorant to the consumer to say "When I was living in the ghetto, I sold my books for $30 because the cost of living was $800 a month. But now that I got me a mansion and a Ferrari, I'm selling my books for $300 because the cost of my living is $12,000 a month.
It is bull crap pseudo logic. This is not how capitalism works. The producer of a good or service does not dictate price; the consumer does. If you sell something, and the people think it's too expensive, you've lost a sale to the guy who sold the same product/service for a lower price.
Look I know writers want to make a living off their writing, musicians want to make a living off their music, artists want to make a living off their painting etc. But at the end of the day it's all supply and demand. And the consumer creates the demand that you supply them with. Wanna charge an arm and a leg? -watch the demand for your product drop in favor of your competition that is underselling you. That is the heart and soul of capitalism, and it's never had a damn thing to do with your own personal cost of living.
One more thing. Soon, maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, there will be no book publishing companies. Their reason to exist is no longer applicable. They linger around because of all the old people who can't get with the changing times and prefer to do everything the old fashioned way they were brought up. But when those people are gone, the middlemen have out stayed their welcome, and become a profit hog, and they will vanish by the same capitalist forces that brought them into being to begin with. However, these middlemen won't go with out a fight. Hell, they fought pretty hard to outlaw the printing press machine. but they lost, and they will lose again.
I don't have a link, I forgot where I found that article, and it was months ago. There is a possibility I misunderstood the article though. Like, maybe it wasn't amazon that was sued, or court restricted to do something, but one of the many technical things like the license offered by Adobe for their PDF format, or some crap like that.
Anyhow, regarding the link that Christopher put up:
I take issue with this statement "But you also have overhead expenses to meet such as rent or mortgage, utility bills, transportation, computer equipment, depreciation and countless other necessities and amenities."
There is no overhead in writing a book (not unless you consider the cost of advertizing).
Writing a book is free. To claim you have cost of labor because you must pay your rent, buy food, and the like, is as absurd as claiming it is the cost of masturbating. Hey, it takes time, and time is money, because living isn't free.
Then there's this "The first task we perform to reissue a previously published book is to accurately reproduce the printed text as a digital file. Even if you possess the original text file, for publication purposes it’s useless. The text you turned in to your publisher was subsequently copyedited and proofread. You may want to key into your computer the changes that your publisher made to your original text file. That will probably take you a minimum of a week – 40 hours. If your hourly cost is $40.00 that’s $1,600.00, a foolish expenditure when it is so much cheaper to have your printed edition scanned."
What? We're talking about eBooks, right? You need to do your own proof reading and editing. Gone are the days of musicians who can rock out on the guitar, but have no idea how to press the "record" button and adjust volume and compression on individual tracks. Today musicians play their instruments (often multiple instruments) and do their own recording, mixing, distribution. Writers need to do their proof reading and editing.
But let me get into the real WTF moment of this paragraph. What is this about it's cheaper to scan your printed version, than to convert a .txt file into a .pdf file? Am I misunderstanding something? Cost of transforming txt or doc into pdf= free
Look, maybe because I am not a professional writer, I am speaking out of pure ignorance and sticking my foot in my mouth. But the cost of publishing an eBook is free. Here's what you do:
1. Write the book on your computer (the thing you bought to google porn with).
2. Read over it, get at least one friend to read it. Hammer out the dents in the story, make it flow better, fix the typos, save as PDF.
3. Establish copyrights and the ISBN number (I have no idea how this is done).
4. Learn basic HTML (one week of study, it's free).
5. Get a domain name ($10 a year) and a host ($7 a month).
6. Build a simple website advertizing and promoting your book, copy&paste some excerpts from the book, fill your website with advertizing so you make your $7 a month to cover hosting, upload the pdf, configure the download link to require a unique password that is generated when customer pays with credit card (I don't know how to do this, but I'm sure if you go to a computer tech forum and ask, they'll give you the php script to copy paste into your website).
Done.
Sure you might want to get your book on a big time seller like Barns and Noble, and Amazon, but this is the equivalent of saying "I don't want to play my music at stinkin' night clubs man, I want to jam at Carnegie Hall".
The point I am trying to make is that being a writer, back in the pre internet day, was really tough. Once upon a time you had to write, edit, and all that jazz, then have a clergymen painstakingly copy word for word everything in your book, writing it all down with a feather quill i.e. books were expensive things.
Then came the print press! Well now a book that might never see more than a hundred copies could be made into millions of copies in no time. The price of books went down because the cost of manufacturing them went down.
Furthermore, they were still physical things which means they had to go to a store, which means there had to be a distributor. Next, the people that bought the books were store owners, not customers. Customers offered profits to the store owner, not the writer or publisher. Speaking of publisher, if any store was going to buy a bulk of your books, a publisher had to muscle them into doing it. Publishers were picky and wanted big bucks.
Today, production of a book is free. No paper, no presses, no ink! Billions of copies can be made instantly on demand forever and ever.
And, we just cut out a ton of middlemen.
You can't tell me the cost today is greater than the cost of doing it yesterday. We need no physical resources, and we don't need middle men, how the hell does the cost go up?
As for that nonsense about the worth of your time; that cannot be taken into account, because regardless of whether you ever write a book, you have to pay for those things.
Furthermore, it is truly ignorant to the consumer to say "When I was living in the ghetto, I sold my books for $30 because the cost of living was $800 a month. But now that I got me a mansion and a Ferrari, I'm selling my books for $300 because the cost of my living is $12,000 a month.
It is bull crap pseudo logic. This is not how capitalism works. The producer of a good or service does not dictate price; the consumer does. If you sell something, and the people think it's too expensive, you've lost a sale to the guy who sold the same product/service for a lower price.
Look I know writers want to make a living off their writing, musicians want to make a living off their music, artists want to make a living off their painting etc. But at the end of the day it's all supply and demand. And the consumer creates the demand that you supply them with. Wanna charge an arm and a leg? -watch the demand for your product drop in favor of your competition that is underselling you. That is the heart and soul of capitalism, and it's never had a damn thing to do with your own personal cost of living.
One more thing. Soon, maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, there will be no book publishing companies. Their reason to exist is no longer applicable. They linger around because of all the old people who can't get with the changing times and prefer to do everything the old fashioned way they were brought up. But when those people are gone, the middlemen have out stayed their welcome, and become a profit hog, and they will vanish by the same capitalist forces that brought them into being to begin with. However, these middlemen won't go with out a fight. Hell, they fought pretty hard to outlaw the printing press machine. but they lost, and they will lose again.
This is a completely ignorant and insulting statement. A freelance writer is, financially speaking, a small business. What if you were talking about, say, an accountant or a coder? There are plenty of people today whose work consists of sitting in front of a computer entering data; there are whole businesses that revolve around that. So it's absurd and completely disconnected from reality to claim that such professions have no overhead. Of course writers have overhead -- the cost of the computers and storage media we use, for one thing, as well as the cost of printing and postage (since some editors and markets still require hardcopy submissions), the cost of research materials such as books and videos, the cost of travel to conventions and signings, the cost of maintaining a post office box, things like that.
Not to mention that those of us who are self-employed as freelance writers don't have the advantage of company-provided health care. We have to pay that major cost out of our own pockets, and so hell yes, that is a huge part of the overhead for a self-employed small businessperson. As for rent, utilities, and the like, that does indeed count as well, because for the self-employed -- whether writers or anyone else who's a single-operator business working from home -- the home is also the workplace and its maintenance is part of the business expense. That's why lots of writers and the like set aside a particular place in their homes as an office, a dedicated place of business, so that their tax preparers can treat it as such and count a certain percentage of their living expenses as business expenses. If the IRS is okay with that being called business overhead, then you sure as hell aren't qualified to say otherwise.
Did you actually bother to read the entire passage you just quoted? Because he answers you right there. Yes, you could do it yourself, but it's easier to get the final edition scanned.
Yes, you are. The passage is very clearly talking about incorporating changes that the publisher made in the text of your document during the editing and proofreading phase -- changes that wouldn't be part of your own manuscript file unless you went to the trouble of working them in manually. The point is that scanning the finished version of the work will account for all those changes in content more easily than a manual compare-and-replace.
That is the only correct and intelligent thing you have said in this entire post.
You really have no comprehension how insulting you're being. You talk about writing a book as if it were easy, but if you ever tried it, you'd find it to be one of the hardest things you've ever done. Writing a book means months of work, sometimes years. That's a huge investment of labor, and yes, there are expenses that have to go into that as well. If nothing else, spending months writing a book means that you're not using that writing time to sweep floors or sell burgers or code software or whatever, so that's money you're not making while you're busy writing. So it's only fair to get paid for that time you spent on the project, which, again, is an awful lot of time.
Which you can do far better with the help of an experienced, professional proofreader or copyeditor, who also deserves to get paid for his or her labor just like anyone else does.
It still is. The Internet makes a few things easier, like delivering a manuscript to a publisher or doing research. But it hasn't changed as much of the process as you imagine.
Again, dead wrong. You're forgetting the fundamental principle of capitalism that labor has value. Anything that people need to work on doing is not free, not in a capitalist system. And yes, people do need to do work in order to market and publicize e-books.
How do you make a living?! How would you feel if your boss told you that the 40 hours a week or whatever that you devote to doing your job is not worth anything, so he's not going to pay you for anything beyond the cost of whatever physical materials you use in your job? Think about that before you claim that the idea of time having value is "nonsense."
Nothing you've said has anything to do with how capitalism works.
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