They got the order wrong. Watched any TV movie premieres lately?

Four months after the initial hardcover marketing spree is far too long, in my view. The industry should embrace and facilitate eBooks, not attempt to hold them back. Hardcover is not threatened by eBooks at all – the markets are different. Concurrent release is the way to go.

And don’t get me started on the foolishness of regional publishing restrictions! -LOL

Cheers,
-Phflupp

And there is no way Smashwords would allow, say , House of Anansi to upload titles, let alone Hachette. Smashwords has, what, 5000 titles? Lots of pubs have that on back-list. Plus even getting that back-list in a digital format can be a drag (often having no electronic formats). And then Smashwords doesn’t allow DRM… (not that I have great things to say about DRM).

My point is more that a huge shift is occurring in the industry and replacing workflow, restructuring organizations, and managing mass-amounts of data is costly.

To be fair, all of these prices will go down, but right now companies are spending a lot of money restructuring and adjusting to digital change. It’s not cheap at all.

And remember, of course, eBooks aren’t sold on a consignment (returnable) basis, so the publisher isn’t stuck with paying printing, warehousing and freight for unsold copies.

Nonetheless, that “actual cost” must factor in development (editing, designing, promoting — and, oh yeah, paying the author). If those costs could be successfully spread across multiple platforms, then one might be able to arrive at an equitable “actual cost.”

That being said, while I don’t much care for e-books myself, I’m not against them. What does bother me is this notion that they’re somehow going to ‘replace’ the extremely robust technology of the printed book. At this point, e-book readers cost more than the annual spending of many casual readers before a single book is purchased, never mind how completely inaccessible they are to anyone on the wrong end of the digital divide. They are also made more or less exclusively from non-renewable materials (plastic is made from oil, metals must be mined, and zinc production–which is a part of many consumer electronics–is actually looking to drop by 50% in the next few years as most major sources become depleted), while books, despite the largish carbon footprint that comes from their transportation, are made forests that, despite some problems, we largely know how to manage sustainably.

E-books aren’t going away, and nor should they. But we need to be a bit more conservative in our claims about them, I think. The problem I see is if we wind up beating up traditional publishing with claim chowder and predatory pricing to the point where, when the e-book market finally establishes itself, there will nothing left for those of us who can’t afford all these lovely middle class trinkets, but who could have afforded a handful of actual physical books.

It would be interesting to know what the actual cost is to produce an average-sized novel (90,000 words) in each of the four formats – hardcover, trade paperback, paperback, ebook.

Companies don’t always price their products based on actual cost, but perceived value. It helps to make up for the shrinking margins existing in other product lines. However, in the case of ebooks, I think a fair number of consumers will expect an ebook to be priced on par or lower than a paperback format.

Is a retail price of $9.99 an unfair amount, based strictly on cost? It would be interesting to know.