Complain to Amazon who is taking 40% of the cover price and restricting you.
I'm sure publishers likely love it, but read inside the cover of any book. Your right to resell it is enshrined in law (as long as you haven't destroyed it). Publishers have survived with books being traded and handed around. I'm sure they'd be fully satisfied if eBooks only had DRM to force the book to pass to someone else (IE not copying but truly transferring), as the industry has done exemplary with it.
Also, I can routinely find used books for $1 at garage sales. I bought the entire Ender series and Mars trilogy in almost mint condition for less than $1 a book as I couldn't move my collection with me when I immigrated to Canada. If cost was the true selling price for me on a book, I can get a lot of good quality books for a lot cheaper than anything on the open market, especially ebooks even when Amazon does ridiculously discount them.
Publishers are actually starting to format their ebooks, which yes will make it cost more than a paperback while ebooks remain a secondary release. Not only are formatters having to learn how to correctly format for multiple devices, but they're also having to deal with changeable formats and font sizes.
So yes, its going to cost more when formatted properly over a read-as-is format where it only needs to be formatted properly to fit the page.
ebooks if they were to be released like a book would only lose 20% of the face price of the book if companies like Amazon are willing to pass up the distributor costs and the publishers are truly not needing the publishing costs.
However 40% of book prices belong to the retailer. Between 10-15% belong to the Author for writing the book. The remaining 25-30% belong to the publisher to pay all those pesky inconveniences like editors and proof readers, etc. that actually make books readable to millions and not wholly illiterate dribble.
Assuming ebooks remain nothing but a parasite on the industry, you might assume a 10-20% discount off of face price unless the retailer offers discounts, which is what a lot of big booksellers do like Chapters/Indigo/Cole here in Canada.
"which yes will make it cost more than a paperback while ebooks remain a secondary release"
You mean because paperbacks use the formatting from the hardcover edition, so their formatting comes for free?
I am still not convinced that your maths is really set in stone. For example, does the retailer still need to get 40%? Editors and proof readers are the same for ebooks as for paperbacks, hopefully.
How hard is the formatting of an ebook, what does it entail? I don't think they can just add new paragraphs? Couldn't the process be automated (LateX seems to be doing quite well with automated layout?
Actually Latex does a pretty crappy job routinely producing widows and orphans. The only way to change this seems to screw up the pagebreaking.
When was the last time you saw a widow or orphan in a book? I'll bet never for one from a major printer.
There are many things done in books to hugely improve readability that all have to be re-learnt and redone.
Also, yes paperbacks can use the same formatting as the hardcover if the page proportions are the same. Just an FYI hardcovers usually have larger fonts and the page can sometimes simply be scaled down without screwing anything up. So yes, sometimes it is free.
I think what people are failing to understand is that, you know, someone MAKES these things. They're not just farted out of thin air. A junior editor sifts through hundreds of submissions and passes it onto an actual editor, who passes it onto another, and then it passes to a third and if all four people liked it then they'll make an offer to buy it. Then it goes through several rounds of being edited, then finally it's proof read, then it passes through a typesetter who arranges text spacing, etc. to ensure they're not getting widows on pages (this applies to eBooks too!).
I made a post of this a while ago that hit big after last time a wholly ignorant post like this was made by someone not trying to comprehend the business they're complaining about. http://nikgregory.com/2010/02/of-amazon-and-ebooks/
When I first saw the spike it was for XKCD and Penny Arcade, I was expecting it to be internet culture related. I mean at the time XKCD was still growing in readership and to get a colossal jump was a bit weird so I was wondering about a Digg or Reddit boost, then when I noticed it was wider and into more obscure terms I wondered if it was an oddball 4chan event. However I saw it in literally every term I searched, the only ones I couldn't see it in were terms that already had huge random spikes.
So I thought I'd post it here, see if anyone else could figure it out and it looks like a few people have good suggestions - gotta love HN.
I wholly agree with your points, however I wanted to stay away arguing the point that games like The Longest Journey (one of my favourites for epic stories) are art qualified solely because they're a video-novel not a video-game.
A game is a game, so I wanted to stay away from screwing with definitions and (I hope) I managed that. I don't consider certain things art, which others do. Music is one of my peeves, because it has so rarely emotionally touched me that it barely qualifies as art to me, but (and please do if you disagree) someone else will likely follow this right up disagreeing wholly that music is fundamentally art.
What if fundamentally boils down to is that mine, yours and Eberts opinions on art don't matter and never have. Ebert sadly will be forgotten months after he stops reviewing (for whatever reason), I'll likely be forgotten 5-minutes after this drops from the HN front page. You're right though that Mario in 30 years will likely still be remembered and played and felt as a great game, after all every gamer in threads like this are quoting games that are from two-decades to a few years old. The original Mario has already stood the test of time, so has the original Final Fantasy, yet I'll still pick up a copy and play once in a while just to get that feeling back. Just like I'll rewatch a movie or relook at a piece of art.
> The original Mario has already stood the test of time,...
Just a note: 30 years is not a test of time; I think you need to hit around 200 years to get to that mark. Video games are truly a nascent art form, and I think Mario's got a shot at surviving for a while, but it's too soon to really tell.
Star Wars arguably has stood the test of time, at least in the film realm for being hugely popular 33 years after its initial release. Only 29 years after our first seeing Mario and he's still hugely popular and putting out sequels with new characters everyone hates.
Although I do see your point in that the medium as a whole has only been around, recognizably, for 40 years. Surviving 3/4 the life of your medium isn't a profound achievement, when compared to The Art of War being 2600 years old. It's a bit like comparing a glass of water to the ocean. But then film is still a nascent art form when compared with literature, architecture and theater.
So: Compared to film, I would disagree. Mario has stood his test of time. Compared to literature, then film is in the same boat.
Fine art is (generally) static, but film and theatre are not, they're the performing arts and this is where I believe video games fall. Where is the difference between Titanic and Avatar? Is Avatar not art or is it excluded because of graphics? Is Shreck not art because it's even more computerised? Where is the line? There isn't one, people insist there is a line somewhere yet they, like Ebert, fail to define where and why that line is.
As I said, there are many things I wouldn't consider art, but I know for a fact 90% of people disagree with me.
It says the Neato avoids humans, so I'm assuming it also avoids pets. So now I wonder how much work the Neato will get done around a territorial house rabbit. I think I'd feel sorry for the robot, it's either not going to be able to clean one of the dirtiest sections of floor (sawdust and hay) or it's going to have to keep deploying to its own personal Iraq. I'm glad to see there's no exposed rubber that can be easily stripped off.
I know the Roomba wouldn't have survived my rabbit, too many raised plastic edges and no ability to avoid him. I would be interested in seeing if the Neato would be capable of entering my rabbits territory over concurrent visits. Although I'd definitely have nightmares of the rabbit hijacking the Neato.
If John Grisham has 10% printing costs, I think everyone else is likely to. The problem with extrapolating from self-pub figures is that these companies make money off of printing. Publishers don't make a penny off of printing, they make their money once pre-production and marketing has been paid off.
Of course every book is unique, some writers are awful and need more editing, others are brilliant and need none. Colour pages drive up prices ridiculously and non-fiction books are not priced like fiction, which is the major debate piece on the eBook front, discussing non-fiction is rather irrelevant as prices are based on work regardless of cost, plus they need to pay off expenses fast due to far lower sale volumes.
But do the publishers really not make a penny off of printing? In the music business, the labels often own the manufacturing plants as well...is that not the case in print publishing?
Printing is 10% of cover price, distribution is 10% of cover price (this I believe includes the cost of returning too). For a hardcover this can total $8, for a mass market paperback this can be $1. Amazon, lik
I didn't get into a discussion of benefits of eBooks, especially when colour e-ink readers arrive. Specifically comics and graphic novels would likely fare excellently, low editing costs (almost all the work is done by the author art, inking, and minor amounts of writing), virtually no marketing or advertising costs make printing (higher than a simple black-ink book) and distribution the major costs. It could literally be back to $0.99 comic books. Printing in comics can be up to 40% of cover price, distribution taking 30%, which compared to a book is killer.
I have no intention to say eBooks aren't going to become huge one day, but many of the costs in book making are from well before the ink hits paper. Unless you're willing to sacrifice quality, the prices are going to remain very close.
Other breakdowns always seem to hit close. All numbers are averages, but printing generally hit between 8% and 12% for fiction. However all prices vary, some writers need no editing so figures for printing will be artificially raised, whilst a poor writer with great ideas will cost a small fortune to edit and printing will be tiny in comparison.
Colour pages and anything else always cost more (I once read 20 colour pages in a book can cost as much to print as the other 230 pages), same with non-colour artwork and everything else.
Non-fiction is always priced differently from fiction due to extra steps in the editing process. Sources have to be reviewed and evaluated, plus the author can have an advance before they've finished the second chapter.
Agreed, it's not really anything more than a gimmick. However, if it only appears once in a few thousand applications it's going to grab attention while someone is trying to figure out what the heck it is.
I'm sure publishers likely love it, but read inside the cover of any book. Your right to resell it is enshrined in law (as long as you haven't destroyed it). Publishers have survived with books being traded and handed around. I'm sure they'd be fully satisfied if eBooks only had DRM to force the book to pass to someone else (IE not copying but truly transferring), as the industry has done exemplary with it.
Also, I can routinely find used books for $1 at garage sales. I bought the entire Ender series and Mars trilogy in almost mint condition for less than $1 a book as I couldn't move my collection with me when I immigrated to Canada. If cost was the true selling price for me on a book, I can get a lot of good quality books for a lot cheaper than anything on the open market, especially ebooks even when Amazon does ridiculously discount them.