More "kindle economics"

[phantom power]

Been using my kindle since xmas, and I've come up with two economic observations:

1) The 'kindle model' is good, in the sense that it enables any author to self-publish, and obtain an audience. In this respect, it enables the little guy.

2) The kindle model is not so good, in the sense that it by-passes local booksellers. I cannot use my kindle, and support my local book stores.

How that adds up in the big picture, I don't know.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. Its only going to get worse

I went Kindle some time ago. I even publish my class material in ebook form, including Kindle. I did it for economics and ease of update, with a side of less waste. However, it changes a number of dynamics, including class attendance and caused some friction inside the department (my stuff is free, vice buying the syllabus), since other profs refuse to do it.

[MineralMan]

2. It's true. There's just no market anymore for buggy furnishings

or horse collars. Even worse, and more recent, the typewriter market has collapsed.

[abelenkpe]

5. :) nt

[pokercat999]

3. How much does a "book" for Kindle cost? With no printing

binding, shipping, storing, retailing brick and mortar style why does it cost so much and who gets the extra profit?

[phantom power]

4. I'm not so sure it's "extra" so much as "preserving"

In no particular order:

1) The cost does include the cost of the mobile internet service. Every time I browse amazon or download a book via the kindle, I'm using mobile internet. That is included in the cost, I don't have to pay for it separately.

2) I understand relatively little about publishing biz, but I believe the publishers are attempting to preserve their profit margins. This is a bone of contention, and some future competition in the ebook market will probably benefit.

3) I'm sure Amazon is in the phase of recouping their development costs.

4) It's still kind of an early adopter thing, so they're going to keep the price as high as they think they can just because.

5) Prices of books you can get via kindle can vary pretty widely. Most new(ish) books seem to go in the 9-10 dollar range (which is substantially cheaper than buying a new hardcover). Anything that has already gone to mass-market paperback seems to cost about the same as a mass-market paperback. Some people are putting very old stuff, including individual short stories up on kindle. Those cost about fifty cents to a buck. I doubt it's a coincidence that it's around what you'd pay for the same thing at a used book store.

So prices are definitely set in context of what they're competing against in the paper book space.

[bain_sidhe]

7. Preproduction costs approach 6 or 7 dollars

That's if you want a real book, published by real publishers, with an acquisitions department that winnows out the chaff, and an editor that can look at it with objective eyes (unlike the author, who frequently considers every word as his/her own personal baby), and smooth out the rough spots, tighten up the prose and improve the pacing and flow, and the copyeditor that removes/fixes annoying grammatical and continuity errors, and proofreaders who, well, proofread, and a marketing department that gets the word out, and the royalty bean-counters who make sure that authors actually, you know, get PAID for their work.

Of course, if you want to sort through all the self-published dreck yourself, and find the few gems, it's free. Like Lulu.

Here's a fun look at a world without book publishers:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/03/why-in-fact-publishing-will-not-go-away-anytime-soon-a-deeply-slanted-play-in-three-acts/

**edited for missing word. Coulda used a proofreader... :)

[bain_sidhe]

8. Oh! And here's the one I was looking for

When I found Scalzi's fun piece:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html

In which one of my favorite authors analogizes book publishing to airline travel:

It is a common misconception — to paraphrase a commenter in the previous post on common misconceptions about publishing, that "the only two people that matter are the author and the reader (one puts creativity in, the other money: the rest add cost)".

This is a bit like saying that in commercial air travel, "the only two people that matter are the pilot and the passenger (the rest add cost)". To which I would say: what about the air traffic controllers (who stop the plane flying into other aircraft)? What about the maintenance engineers who keep it airworthy? The cabin crew, whose job is to evacuate the plane and save the passengers in event of an emergency (and keep them fed and irrigated in flight)? The airline's back-office technical support staff who're available by radio 24x7 to troubleshoot problems the pilots can't diagnose? The meteorology folks who provide weather forecasts and advise flight planners where to route their flights? The fuel tanker drivers who are responsible for making sure that the airliner has the right amount of the right type of fuel to reach its destination, and that it's clean and uncontaminated? The designers and engineers at Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, or the other manufacturers who build the bloody things in the first place ...?

And then goes on to explain, in excruciating detail, all those parts of the publishing industry that add all those costs. Yes, dropping the actual printing and distribution costs would save some money - that's why e-books cost half of what hardcovers do - but not as much as you think.

I knew I'd read it somewhere, but googling turned up the Scalzi piece first...

[Statistical]

9. Printing is a very small part of actual book cost.

The physical printing cost less than 10% for hardback = about $2-$3. Paperbacks with their lower prices mean that printing makes up greater % of final price about $1 to $1.50 depending on the size, format, production run.

Books are "expensive" because you are paying for the thousands of man-hours worth of work (finding talent, writing, editing, publishing, etc) it takes to make the text. The printing is not substantial portion of that cost.

http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-of-physical-book-publishing/

So ebooks costs roughly $1 to $3 less than physical books. Lots of people think that since ebook "costs nothing" someday we are going to see ebooks cost 5% or 10% of current physical books. That is simply false.

[eridani]

6. If you want to keep a book, I can't see doing anything other than buying a hardcover

The thing about Kindle is that it allows you to try out really massive amounts of material so that you can better evaluate what is worth keeping.

It is flat out not possible for any electronic technology to serve as an archive. The fact that old data may be perfectly intact on 8" and 5 1/2" floppies doesn't do you a damned bit of good.

[Statistical]

10. Why?

Data can be moved to new formats. There are still functional 5 1/4 and 8" drives out there.

The only data lost in archiving is due to lack of a plan.

Data formats both software and hardware often overlap by years allowing migration.

So someone with a 5 1/4" drive and document in word perfect version 3 COULD simply convert it to Microsoft word and put it on a CD in the early 90s.

Every single Bluray drive produced today reads CD & DVD.

Physical archives take work and planning. Digital archives are no different. The rise of open source formats makes archiving even more robust because with source code available new software for reading/converting can always be written.

[eridani]

11. I've thrown away a bunch of NMR data on 8" floppies from the 80s

There was no formatting that would allow changing it to 5 1/2 or 3" floppies at the time. The only computer program that could read them was embedded in an ancient machine. Luckily, there were printouts of the specta. There is far too much data to migrate, and it is ridiculous to suppose that anyone would bother to try.