For years now, we've been highlighting how book publishers are at war with libraries, and see ebooks and ebook pricing as a key lever in that war. With regular books, a library can just buy the book and lend it out and do what they want with it. But not ebooks. Because of a broken copyright law, publishers retain excess control over ebooks, and they lord that over libraries, arbitrarily raising prices to ridiculous levels, limiting how many times they can lend it out before they have to "repurchase" the ebook, and generally making it as difficult as possible for libraries to actually be able to offer ebooks.
This is because of a broken copyright system that gives publishers way more control over ebooks than traditional hardcopy books. And book publishers have spent the past decade abusing that power. In an ideal world, Congress would get its act together and fix copyright law and properly add first sale rights for digital goods like ebooks. But, without that, some states are trying to step in and fix things, including Maryland, which earlier this year passed a law that would require publishers to sell ebooks to libraries at "reasonable" rates.
With the law set to go into effect next year, helping more Maryland residents get access to ebooks in the midst of a still ongoing pandemic, the book publishers have continued their Grinch-like ways, and sued to block the law. The complaint says that this is an attempt by state law to route around federal copyright law, and since the 1976 Copyright Act, state copyright laws are pre-empted by federal law.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Freeman on Wednesday December 15 2021, @10:52PM (8 children)
Just think of it, instead of spending $5-$10 on a very good, used copy. You could have a brand new e-book for $120. This is why our Library has been unable to push electronic items. We can get 10 to 20 titles in print that we can get in electronic format. Our budget also hasn't gone up in the last decade.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 15 2021, @11:39PM (7 children)
My youngest is out of college now, but college "text" books were priced outrageously. I remember a couple of them that required a USB key be plugged into the computer, before he could do anything. Plug in the key, log into a cloud account, THEN, and only then, could the book be read, and exercises found in the book be completed.
Insane.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @12:08AM (1 child)
Just... no. Why are the students even accepting this? Back in the day we raised a ruckus over insistence on having the latest edition of things that only had layout/typo fixes over last year's edition. There'd been wall-tearing if something this outrageous had been suggested.
(Score: 5, Informative) by aristarchus on Thursday December 16 2021, @08:44AM
Faculty are rebelling. Look up OER, Open Educational Resources. We write our textbooks, and post them on the interwebs, for free. Not a week goes by when I do not get a whining email from a textbook publisher. Buggy whips.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MostCynical on Thursday December 16 2021, @12:17AM
"Insane" (American usage) extremely unreasonable, or mentally ill
"What the market will bear" - capitalism
"Competition" - potential balance to high prices
"Monopoly" - prevents competition
"Cooperative pricing" - suppliers agreeing to limit competition
..
Definition of "unreasonable" seems to be dependent on whether you are a supplier or a consumer..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @12:23AM
Dude, the college textbook cartel is a whole different rent-seeking cocksuckers from these e-book shenanigan.
Anyways, buy books from online or used bookstores, or better yet, rent them from public libraries and donate some money for them.
Listen, you millenials. You think vinyl is cool? Try real paper, real books. A true luxury that is still affordable.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by evilcam on Thursday December 16 2021, @04:09AM (2 children)
I look back on my younger years and I feel a little dirty for all the things I pirated; movies, games, music - you name it...
But never university textbooks. Never ever those. Not even once. I will sleep soundly every goddamn night knowing I never paid a red cent to those leeches and helped other students who weren't IT savvy do likewise.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @11:36AM (1 child)
If you believe in freedom of access to information, then you have an ethical duty to share with others.
I don't feel bad one bit about pirating. If I pirate your work, I'm doing it for my own personal use, and I donate back, directly to the creator, where possible. The patronage model is a huge improvement over copyright to the death (and 70 years beyond!).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Thursday December 16 2021, @06:46PM
I wouldn't consider you to be a pirate then. I believe that most here approve of the pirate first, buy later approach, where buying might mean any of buying a DRM copy, sending the author money, or buying some other stuff, the author will profit from.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @12:29AM
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/right-to-read/ [nakamotoinstitute.org]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday December 16 2021, @12:45AM (23 children)
So how much is a "reasonable" price for a book/e-book anyway?
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Thursday December 16 2021, @12:59AM
Something that is always going to be less than they want to charge.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 16 2021, @01:10AM (20 children)
Most dead tree books are somewhat reasonable at ~$5.00 in paperback, ~$20.00 for hardback, and $50 to $250 for special editions of leather bound volumes and the like.
E-books are reasonably priced somewhere between paperbacks and plain hardbacks. If I really want to read something, I might pay $10.00 for the electronic version. No way am I willing to pay some of the prices I see on Amazon. Of course, with an ebook, the potential to loan it pretty much disappears. I can't buy something on ebay, read it, loan it to my wife, then loan it to my three sons, then gift it to the grandchildren. Other than what I pirate, the ebooks actually reside in the cloud, where I only have the access that the publisher wishes me to have. Just copy/pasting a short passage from a Cloud Kindle book is more trouble than it's worth.
There is probably an addon for Firefox that would enable that ability, but I've not bothered searching for it.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday December 16 2021, @01:17AM (15 children)
I can agree on the reasonable price structure for the dead tree books. But is it really reasonable for a digital book? A book they can have and sell infinite copies of that doesn't really require anything physical that isn't also required by the dead tree book. So if anything reasonable was involved the digital book would be but a tiny little fraction of the cheapest of dead tree books. Yet somehow they are at least as expensive if not more, after all you also need to add costs of a reader or some kind of viewing device etc. Something a dead tree book doesn't even need. The only thing ebooks are good for are out of print technical manuals.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @01:47AM (11 children)
> ...digital book would be but a tiny little fraction of the cheapest of dead tree books
If you look at a specialty book, say a reference book for a niche in engineering (something I'm familiar with) there are other costs you haven't considered. Production costs before any income to the publisher includes: research to see if the book has a market, negotiation of book contract with author, author advance, payment to editor, payment to typesetter, payment to technical artist, payment to proofreader, payment to indexer, cost of revisions requested by author (often over 10% of pages need to be redone). Once there is a "work" ready for sale, with the above sunk costs, then there are marketing/advertising costs (including free copies to potential reviewers) and finally fulfillment costs (which are the low costs you refer to above for digital books). *If* the book sells enough copies to meet the cost of the advance, then there are also royalties to be paid in the future.
Publishers have to recoup all the costs noted above (and more that I've missed) or they won't be in business very long. You do the math.
In the case of a tech book as noted above, I'm quite happy that our publisher has not offered any digital or e-editions, only a high quality sewn binding hard cover. For comparison, the price is at the very low end of textbook pricing (USD$100) for a very durable book of 900 pages.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Frigatebird on Thursday December 16 2021, @02:09AM
You talk like Big Pharma! Is this an accident? I have never heard of you, or your book. Is it on Tik-tok?
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Thursday December 16 2021, @05:52AM (1 child)
Authors have been able to software-index their own books for about 40 years. Pearson & Shaw computer-indexed "Life Extension" which was published in June 1982. Practically speaking, authors can do their own digital typesetting and in most cases should be doing their own artwork.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @12:40PM
GP here.
Index: My pre-Windows wordprocessor supported indexing--type a short tag next to the word/item to be indexed, software takes care of the rest. I was a co-author and I tried to do this for about a day. Gave up completely, figuring out *what* to index was essentially impossible for me. My personal take is that the indexing process is orthogonal to the writing process, luckily the publisher had a retired engineer who did an excellent job. As a guess he charged about USD $10K for a very detailed 900 page book, 30 pages of Index ~25 years ago. Note, I'm talking about a useful Index, not an automatically generated concordance, and yes, he used some sort of specialized software.
Typesetting: Yes, anyone can typeset these days, and it often looks like hell. As the author, I want to spend my time writing, not formatting. The software I used had minimum distractions on screen so I could keep focused on the writing. Later we did a smaller book and we used LaTeX, luckily one co-author was a programmer and was able to coax the typesetting into matching the design of a companion book (which was professionally typeset).
Art: 400+ complex line drawings, some original, some modified existing art (vector art drawn over scans), done by a moonlighting commercial artist, took a year. He did ~10 new figures each week, plus a review session to correct figs from the previous week. Cost to the publisher $40K. No way did the authors have the time or skill to produce this level of art.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday December 16 2021, @09:47AM (7 children)
But all those things have to be done no matter if it's a dead tree book or an electronic book. They are pretty much the same up until one goes to the printers and the other one goes to the library cloud or whatever. The e-book might add some technical details such as searching or hyperlinks etc that can come with the file but all the research and writing and layout should be the same. So they should carry the same cost. But the e-book doesn't have a printing associated cost. The logistics of selling an e-book should be significantly smaller then a dead tree one. The electronic book doesn't take up shelf space in a warehouse or a bookstore etc. It's just a few megabyte (or whatever) on a server (or multiple servers) somewhere. The dead tree book pre-printing is also these days a electronic book in that regard, the manuscript is a document of some type somewhere etc. So dead tree books should just be more expensive as they carry a lot more costs, unless they want to cut into their margins and I doubt they will want to do that. So the profit for an electronic book if the cost is the same as a dead tree edition should be massive.
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Friday December 17 2021, @02:42AM (5 children)
This comes up every time with e-book discussions.
The actual manufacturing and distribution cost of a paperback novel is under $1. For a large, high quality, full-colour hard back in small quantities that might go as high as $20.* If you've got time to ship them in from Asia, that can go even cheaper.
Everything else you pay for is non-physical. The author, editor, publisher. Those are the same for e-book or dead-tree book.
Printing is ridiculously efficient and commoditised. It seems crazy, but the work to turn a manuscript into a e-book, spread over the expected sales of the e-book, can easily cost more than the production costs of dead-tree versions.
Not really. Even if you are using a PDF-based workflow, you can't just sell that PDF. And converting to any other format can be a considerable amount of work.
---
* Embossed leather covers and hand sewn with gilt page edges will cost you more, but were not really talking mass production at that point.
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 17 2021, @04:41PM (4 children)
Does anyone realistically use a PDF-based workflow?
PDF was designed from day one as a non-editable pre-print format - you do all your workflow around some other format designed for editing, and only convert to PDF for printing or distribution. But in the printing industry you're almost certainly going to rely on typesetting rather than any sort of earlier formatting.
From what I've read over the years, many/most novelists actually lean towards text editors, or formats that support only minimalist markup-style formatting. Formatting just isn't particularly relevant to a novel beyond chapter headers and possibly subheaders, the occasional block quote, or an image that won't get positioned within the text until the manuscript reaches the final stages of the pre-print typesetting pipeline.
And there's no reason there should be any difficulty in having the typesetting pipeline spit out an epub or other ebook format in addition to the print version. In fact 99% of typesetting is completely irrelevant to ebooks, which really only need the most basic aspects of typesetting markup converted to their own simple markup, which is a process that can easily be completely automated in 99% of cases. In fact virtually all badly-formatted e-books are the result of the publisher trying to do something clever rather than just letting the ebook reader to its own typesetting based on the format's own basic markup language they way it was designed to.
For books with more complicated layouts like textbooks you *might* have an argument - but in that case the author(s) are very likely to have been working with a LaTeX or similar typesetting-oriented format to begin with, which should be similarly trivial to automatically convert to an ebook format.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday December 17 2021, @07:28PM (3 children)
The print industry does. The PDF workflow is a production system, it comes after the creative / editing process.
It's part of the commodification of the industry. Typesetters and publishers are separate from printers these days. They set up the document exactly how they want it, usually in InDesign or Quark.
They then export that as a series of PDFs and send those to whichever printer they are using.
The print company will impose* and print those PDFs.
Note that these PDFs are not like what you see on the web. The images are very high res and ALL the fonts are embedded. A book can easily be multi GB of files. 50 or 100 MB per page is normal for a book with colour pictures.
For things like novels you would be much better off going back to the step before the typesetter to make an epub. The typesetter's job is to lock things down, not to make free-flowing auto-wrapping text. Just after the editor has ok'd the final text is probably the best point, from then on the print and e-book requirements diverge.
So yeah, what the PDF workflow replaced was all the old time cut and paste, manual imposition, film, and developing plates stuff at the printers. You still need plates for the presses, but you use a CTP (Computer to Plate) machine and go straight from PDF to metal.
* imposition : the process of putting all the pages on a big sheet of paper in such a way that after you fold it down to a single page the images are all the right way up and in order.
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 17 2021, @08:09PM (2 children)
>Note that these PDFs are not like what you see on the web
Right - they're proper fully self-contained print-ready PDFs. What PDF was invented for. The PDF is not part of the workflow, it's the digital version of the final product that gets delivered to the printer to be turned into physical product.
>For things like novels you would be much better off going back to the step before the typesetter to make an epub.
Right - perhaps I explained poorly.
At some point in the production stream you have to make sure all the markup is correct for the "hyperlinks" like table of contents, appendices, etc. All the stuff that will eventually refer to specific page numbers *after* typesetting is complete.
I would assume that's done either at the end of (or as part of) the editing process, or *very* early on in the typesetting process, depending on the exact workflow of the publisher. Wherever it happens, as soon as you have the markup validated you should be ready to spit out a nice tidy epub/HTML/whatever file as a completely automated process. If you want to be classy you can then attach cover art, the back-cover teaser text, etc. as metadata, but it seems like a lot of ebook publishers don't even bother with that.
Basically - if you're printing a physical book, the incremental cost of *also* generating an ebook is approximately zero - you just need to hit the button to translate your marked-up format to an ebook format.
There may be some up-front costs to develop that translator, but once you do that for the first book all subsequent books can be translated for free.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday December 18 2021, @05:58AM (1 child)
That would be true for a PDF e-book. You can easily just have two pre-sets and run subsets of fonts, lower-res version of pics and make a PDF of whatever size you like to sell as an e-book. Maybe a couple of minutes extra work at the end of typesetting.
But for something like a novel, no. *.epub and *.lit files have different needs to printing. Paragraph and chapter marks, but the text in each paragraph needs to reflow for different size screens and fonts. Really, the closest thing is the word-processing file the editor delivers to the typesetter. Everything the typesetters do takes it further away from what you want. Turning that editor's file into a decent e-book takes time and needs proofing. If you want to keep a reputation for quality you also need to test it on a range of readers.
To be honest, I think you're right that it should be easy, I just don't think it is at the moment. There's probably a market opportunity for software that can take a docx and churn out a good e-pub.
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday December 18 2021, @08:38PM
Ebook formats don't need to know anything about reflowing - that's done in the *reader*. There is no typesetting required or desired for an ebook - an ebook is basically a text file akin to an HTML file with the navigation points properly tagged. In fact, .epub basically *is* a packaged HTML file. And just like HTML, any attempt at fancy formatting is just going to cause lots of problems for lots of readers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 17 2021, @03:17AM
Publishing industry is 100% based on MS Word. 'nuff said.
(Score: 3, Informative) by EvilSS on Thursday December 16 2021, @04:53PM
The physical book is a tiny portion of the cost of a book. There are the store margins, wholesale margins, publisher, and author's take all in there as well.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @06:06PM
One thing which uninformed people don't realize is how counterintuitive industries are. It's similar to when somebody asks, "Why can't you play PlayStation games on a PC? They're both computers, right?"
In the case of books, the actual cost to manufacture and transport books is shockingly low. I want to say something like 20% the gross cost of the book. Admittedly board games are different, but similar idea, and there are some articles about it such as here [boardgamegeek.com].
As a related trivia, try asking somebody with a large corporate account with FedEx/UPS/etc how much it costs to ship a full-sized printer across the US, or check how much it costs to ship that Chinese store to ship a dress from China to the US. It's probably an order of magnitude cheaper than you think it is.
Regardless, by far the largest cost of making a book is the writing, editing, and marketing (plus the profit, of course). All of that still applies to eBooks as much as physical books. It would be similar to how if bread was literally free, your dinner as a whole still wouldn't be because there is more to dinner than just bread.
I don't know what a "reasonable price" should be (I'll cite "I know it when I see it" [wikipedia.org]), but I expect it is much higher than most people intuitively think it should be.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @06:06PM
Finite, actually. The demand (the size of target demographics that has free time and inclination enough to read this particular book) sets the upper limit.
A fraction, yes, but not a tiny one. They still have to cover what the author wants to be paid (per copy and/or lump sum), and the man-hours of the personnel involved in the production of the ebook, and a proportionate part of the cost of maintaining the website they sell it through, and the taxes they have to pay from all of that. And the slower the book sells, the larger would the reasonable price be, for they have to at least break even in a short enough timeframe.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 16 2021, @01:21AM (1 child)
Edit: " I can't buy something on ebay" should have been " I can't buy something on kindle". The only book I'm likely to buy through Ebay is going to be a physical book that is out of print, or really cheap.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @01:58AM
> " I can't buy something on kindle".
Business was a little slow last summer, so when a published author asked me to proofread his "how to" book on an automotive history topic that I'm very familiar with, I agreed to do it. My "fee"--a signed copy of the final book. Turned out to be a really fun project, although we both knew in advance that it was unlikely to ever get beyond niche sales.
Although he's worked with several publishers in the past, this time he chose to use Amazon print-on-demand and fulfillment, and effectively "self publish" with respect to everything else.
Rather than fool around with DRM or any kind of ebook, the author chose to make the book available only in softcover. While I'm not a fan of Amazon, they now have print on demand operations around the world, which avoids the high costs of international shipping. So here's one book you might enjoy if you are a car nut, but the only way to get it is dead trees.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 16 2021, @04:46PM (1 child)
Personally I'm willing to pay paperback prices or even a little more for an e-book without any DRM, so that I can read it wherever I want, loan it out, and otherwise get all the utility I would from a paperback. Yeah, it's vastly larger profit margins for the publisher (and hopefully author), but I'm actually getting a slight increase in value by eliminating the need for shelf space to store it, so I'm okay with that.
Add DRM though, and you've radically reduced the value of the book, and so I'm only willing to pay a radically reduced price. *Maybe* as much as I would for a used paperback (~10%), but only if I can't find a used paperback instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @09:19PM
> Yeah, it's vastly larger profit margins for the publisher
Except you are wrong. See other posts on the total cost of bringing a book to market. Printing/binding in bulk is very low cost these days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @02:06AM
I generally balk at paying more than $10 or $20 for an ebook, but it really depends on the content. For quality technical writing, I will pay way more than I would for a novel or most mass-media non-fiction (but technical content is often *more* reasonably priced than other content). As time goes on, I expect prices to fall. There are numerous free ebooks being created and released daily by passionate amateurs and experts trying to make a difference, as well as lots of very good and cheap commercial content to compete with new books. Amazon and other bookstores try to influence ebook pricing with graduated payment policies, but this seems to only lead to market segmentation as authors flee to more hospitable marketplaces.
(Score: 3, Touché) by shrewdsheep on Thursday December 16 2021, @08:19AM (1 child)
... you are admitting you ask unreasonable prices?
Of course, not. It is just, aehm, aehm against the constitution!
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 17 2021, @08:14PM
Of course! Charging unreasonable prices is the entire goal of capitalism. How else do you expect your betters to afford all those yachts and sports-cars?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @08:46AM (2 children)
Runaway, on Kindle! The ignorant bastard! He is the one supporting copyright!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @11:39AM (1 child)
I support copyall. Copy the stuff on the left, copy the stuff on the right, copy the copies, steal the copies, all the copies.
Copy, copy copy.
Copy.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16 2021, @02:30PM
> Copy, copy copy.
Do you ever bother to read the things you copy?
You sound like a digital kleptomaniac to me, are you also a compulsive shop lifter?