From an article by Andrew Zack in Huff Post:
As a literary agent, I fell victim to the same false conclusions I think most readers do, that e-books are easily produced from paper books. But that’s not quite true. For older books, publishers didn’t own the typesetting file (the typesetter did) and those files were not usually maintained forever. So publishers often have to physically take an old book and have it scanned and then converted using OCR — optical character recognition — which is far from perfect. So publishers — good ones at least — then have the resulting file professionally proofread for scanning errors. And in a perfect world, they also ask the author to proof it again.
Then there’s the question of rights. For older books, the publisher may not have the right to use the cover art in an e-book. Granted, these would have to be much older books, as most publishers started asking for display rights a longer time ago than the Kindle has been around. These display rights are generally interpreted as allowing publishers to display the cover online or on the screen of an eBook reader. But if the publisher doesn’t have those rights, it must acquire them or create a new cover. And new covers cost money.
Then there’s the question of originals. Originals are books that are first appearing in eBook form and are not reprints of previously published books. And here the argument that eBooks should be cheaper and easier to produce than paper books really fails. To produce a quality eBook takes just as long and costs just as much as producing a quality paper book. Yes, you save some money on paper, printing, and binding. And you save some money on warehousing and shipping. But you incur other costs. But first let’s look at the commonalities.
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All true, as far as it goes. But he leaves out some points and glosses over some others. Here’s what I commented (currently pending approval):
I can believe that the production of an ebook costs nearly as much as a print book. The same effort, the same design work, the same expertise to create the finished product. But then things change.
A print run of, say 5,000 copies has a certain cost in paper, ink, distribution, storage, and man-hours. Every print book you produce will incur those costs, every single one.
You only create one ebook, (or 5 or 6, if you count the different formats, and each has peculiarities so you should). 500,000 of them costs the same to produce as 1, except for online storage (minimal) and bandwidth, a tiny fraction of the print cost.
There are more costs specific to ebooks, as you point out. Software to make the books. Servers to host them. Merchant accounts to sell them. But you don’t buy new sets of all of that for every book, you spread the costs out across all the books. And you don’t have to deal with returns or damaged books, one of the biggest drains on print publishing and the enemy of small publishers and something you didn’t mention at all.
Also, the consumer is very aware that when he or she buys an ebook, convenience is traded for true ownership. You can’t easily resell an ebook to recoup some of your money. You can’t donate it, or pass it on to children, or share it with friends, or get it autographed by the author. Those values are lost.
Publishers are in the position now of trying to convince the market that a computer file costs as much to duplicate, store and ship as a pound of paper and ink. Good luck with that.
I want publishing to continue. I want new authors invested in, and editors to cull the bad stuff, and proofreaders to catch mistakes, and promotional departments getting the word out. I expect to pay for the books I read, and I even understand that the cost of a hit book must help cover the losses from a hundred duds. But I cannot accept paying hardcover prices for an ebook, and I expect that ebook price to drop again when the paperback comes out.
Added: Actually my comment had to be edited for space, so it won’t be as long as that. But same ideas 🙂
Very nice comment, Mr. Bridges. Sums it up well.
Somebody should make a list of all the occasions in history where struggling industries have pointed out that they can’t possibly reduce their costs any further — and someone else has demonstrated that THEY can.
How long, I wonder, before the publishing industry starts to apply for government handouts?
In Germany they did it years ago. You pay an extra personal-copy tax when you buy a DVD-burner or an USB-Stick. Now a new law went through parliament. More or less it says that content-aggregation f.e. from newspapers (Google search, Blogs, etc) is stealing and those who do it have to pay. In Germany you can’t see all those music videos at Youtube, because the GEMA want to have more money from Youtube. GEMA is the organisation which collects the moneyfrom the radio stations and divide it then to the music industry.
Yes it is true that some of the same costs apply, or at least similar ones, if a professional approach to publishing is taken, whether the delivery channel is print or digital. However, as usual the premise here seems to be that eBooks are in some way derivative from, or subservient to, a print product.
They are most definitely not. In fact the traditional industry’s obsession with print first production processes and preserving the status quo of the old order of publishing is really where the problem lies. There is no reason why the eBook should carry the overheads of outdated and inefficient workflows, or business structures that have nothing to do with them.