The cost of producing an ebook

"In the emerging world of e-books, many consumers assume it is only
logical that publishers are saving vast amounts by not having to print
or distribute paper books, leaving room to pass along those savings to
their customers."

Read what publishers are saying about the cost of producing an ebook:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Pathetic. It't total bull.

In point of fact, all the editing, etc. is about the same. In fact, less for the ebook because they've already vetted the print edition, the main expense. The converstion to format. with their facilities and preparation, is like an intern working all afternoon.

Now. Production cost is like zero. It's a file. Can be duplicated indefinitely for free. Duh. The 50 cent per unit production cost they claim is either a complete lie or a badge of incompetence.

Why would they have to pay 78 cents promotion on an ebook version of a book they are already selling and promoting? Another flat-out lie.

Shipping costs, zero.

Author's royalty is reduced by the same factor as the retail price.

They make a killing at $12.99 and are crying poor.

I totally agree that the cost is minimal. I used Smashwords for my E-Book. I sent them a flat file version (Word file with little formatting) of my book to them. Their software spit out versions in multiple formats in an hour. Also it was free.

Quote :

“If you want bookstores to stay alive, then you want to slow down this movement to e-books,” said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, a consultant to publishers

That's the most telling sentence in the article. It reveals the publishing industry's agenda, which is to thwart any assault upon its long-standing traditional business model.

The article's discussion of the costs of print media publishing is believable. The discussion of e-book publishing is not well-focused. It fails to differentiate between the costs of publishing an original e-book and publishing an e-book edition of an existing printed book.

I think this article's author either does not understand e-book publishing or is simply parroting the publishing industry's agenda. He also concentrates on the Apple e-book publishing model as if that was the only one.

The article is four months old. A lot has changed in that time. There are more changes coming.

The hidden message is, technology overturns tradition. Get used to it.

I have three Kindle titles published. None of them cost me anything but time. But I am not like a publishing company with an overhead to support against which it must amortize all its sales.

One of my Kindle titles was formerly published in a print edition. I obtained a reversion of rights and did the conversion myself. I am about to do the same with another published print edition title. The out-of-pocket costs are indeed zero, given that I already have the computer, and the software to make the conversion is either already installed or free to download.

Quote :

The discussion of e-book publishing is not well-focused. It fails to differentiate between the costs of publishing an original e-book and publishing an e-book edition of an existing printed book.

This is what I was getting at in the "e book rates" thread elsewhere.

Quote :

It
fails to differentiate between the costs of publishing an original
e-book and publishing an e-book edition of an existing printed book.

Neither is a well defined cost. If you or I want to produce an ebook, we find that the big expense is not longer printing and "on press", but editing and artwork.

But maybe you are a really good editor and I'm not, so I go pay an editor...I will have some considerable cost. You will have virtually none.

Same way, maybe I can do my own cover and you can't... so there's a couple hundred., maybe costs for you that I don't have to bear.

I consider ebooks to be free to produce. I've produced several for free and they sell pretty well.


In fact, it's probably germane to this dicussion to mention:
http://adorobooks.com/works/

My forthcoming, currently being edited by a slave chained in my basement will be "Publishing for Profit", a really different approach to the self-publishing issue.

lin wrote:

If you or I want to produce an ebook, we find that the big expense is not longer printing and "on press", but editing and artwork.

And, beyond producing, marketing, which is probably a bigger challenge for e-books than for other media, Indie and Outie.

lin wrote:

But maybe you are a really good editor and I'm not, so I go pay an editor...I will have some considerable cost. You will have virtually none.

Same way, maybe I can do my own cover and you can't... so there's a couple hundred., maybe costs for you that I don't have to bear.

The perfect scenario for some mutual backscratching, thus eliminating costs for both.

lin wrote:

I consider ebooks to be free to produce.

Agreed.

The costs of converting a contemporary published book to ebook format is minimal, assuming the author or publisher has kept the final draft of the digital copy. I converted one such book with a couple of Word macros. And it had some formatting issues to deal with (computer code, for example).

Their claim that the many e-book formats increase cost is also misleading. You do it once to the standard non-proprietary epub format. Conversion from epub to just about anything else is automatic. In one case, epub to Kindle, it's simply a matter of changing the filename extension.

iPad might have a proprietary format. I haven't gotten that far with it yet. But I am told it nicely displays a book formatted as .pdf.

When you produce an ebook on Smashwords it simultaneously creates about 10 different formats of book, from mobi for kindle and mobi reader to straight html.

You can do all sorts of converting yourself. (Mobi is a good place to start)

iPad and iPhone can be confusing because there are two different things going on there.

An "app" is a very proprietary, complex format. And they pretty much have to come from the Apple app stores (outside of hacking and jailbreaking and all that fonefreak stuff)

But iPad and Blackberry and smartfphones are also internet browsers, so they can actually read a book in pdf or html or anything you could see on the internet.

When I looked into smashwords, they indicated there are two ways to load. In order for your ebook to load in Apple, you need to have an ISBN and load a certain way. It sounded initially too complicated to me, but I might not have been in the right frame of mind. Not all smashword books will be loaded on apple, only those that meet the premium criteria which includes the isbn. That may change....

I loaded my ebook at Kindle because it seemed easier, but the format loaded strange; and I haven't been able to change it. The title is Amour-Stories of Love and Friendship by D. K. Christi. It's $2.99 (and Kindle may discount that...) because its an anthology of six amazon shorts (now that the amazon shorts program is poof). I did pay for the cover - and I think it's beautiful and appropriate for the stories. Just need to sell enough copies to pay for the cover :-). I should have inserted a table of contents at least. Also, when the ebook is downloaded, the cover doesn't download. Other ebooks I have downloaded include the covers. Oh well, learn as I go.

If you have a print book at Amazon with the Look Inside feature, changing that to Kindle is a snap. I did that with Arirang: The Bamboo Connection and it's only $4.76 or something like that for a book of nearly 500 pages that originally sold for $24.95. It has had a resurgence in sales since the Kindle, and I make more per copy than when I sold the print copies. Go figure....

Yes your upload has to qualify to get the ISBN and get into Stanza and iPad.
But it's not really that much more complicated.

Yeah, it's win/win on having ebooks available.