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E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

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Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#31

Post by JoeAltmaier »

dgacmu wrote: post #30
meuk wrote: post #9

> very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format Either that's bullshit, or the costs are entirely artificial. I really, really want "Concrete mathematics" by Donald Knuth. I really, really don't want to pay €80 for it. A good alternative for me would be the e-book, but it isn't any cheaper. I doubt if anyone will buy the ebook for that price while there are free copies available online.

It's entirely dependant upon volume. According to [0], the average US non-fiction book will sell under 3,000 copies in its lifetime. For the proceeds from that to pay the author, editor, and marketing... Well, that's not a lot of copies to amortize those salaries across. The numbers are obviously very different for a New York times best seller, where physical goods costs will represent a larger fraction of the cost.…

Coincidentally, it costs between $2000 and $4000 to print and market a book. So, what, say $1 per book pays for that. The rest pays the author.

But wait! Authors only get a buck or two royalty per book. So why do they cost so much?

Use your imagination.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#32

Post by bovermyer »

meuk wrote: post #9

> very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format Either that's bullshit, or the costs are entirely artificial. I really, really want "Concrete mathematics" by Donald Knuth. I really, really don't want to pay €80 for it. A good alternative for me would be the e-book, but it isn't any cheaper. I doubt if anyone will buy the ebook for that price while there are free copies available online.

Some of this is economies of scale. It's fairly cheap per unit to print 1,000,000 copies of a book. It's much more expensive (again, per unit) to print 1,000 copies.

Books like Lord of the Rings which are guaranteed to sell a large number of copies are much less of a risk to print large numbers of than books like Concrete Mathematics. The publisher rolls that expectation into the retail price.

Additionally, all one-off production costs (like paying an artist for cover art) are rolled into that retail price also, with the expectation that X number of copies will sell over the "initial life" of the book.

That "initial life" is usually the first year of a book's publication.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#34

Post by reaperducer »

tus88 wrote: post #20

I didn't know libraries lent ebooks. Seems kind of strange.

Some (many?) libraries lend out WiFi hot spots so people can have free internet at home.

When I lived in New Jersey, the library lent out power tools.

The Chicago Public library lends out museum passes.

Libraries are about knowledge, not books.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#36

Post by eyegor »

mellosouls wrote: post #22
heinrichhartman wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel exactly the opposite. I hate reading stuff on screens. - It hurts my eyes when I do this for hours. - It comes with lots of distractions. - Digital Annotations are a PITA - Zapping through a book works much better in hard-copy If I am supposed to spent 1h+ reading your content. You better make sure I can buy a printed copy.

If you are reading on a proper* e-reader, eyestrain shouldn't be an issue. *ie classic Kindle with e-ink or similar, not a tablet like iPad/Android equivalent or the annoyingly named Amazon "Kindle" Fire etc. Not great for tech manuals, admittedly

Actually if you're willing to pay for it, you can buy 10+" eink screens with wacom digitizers on top (drawing pen support). They're quite good for tech papers and manuals because they're a similar size to real paper, no eye strain, you can draw notes directly on them, and ofc you can cram tons of papers/textbooks/manuals into something that weighs next to nothing.

Edit: if you're curious, look into the likebook mimas as a starting point. There are other options, that just happens to be the one I've used.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#37

Post by hrktb »

tadzik_ wrote: post #8

> There’s a tension in e-book pricing generally between consumer expectations that a digital file will be less expensive than a physical copy and the reality that very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format There's more to this than the cost of making a book. As a consumer, a physical thing inherently has more value than a digital one because it keeps the value after I buy it. I can len…

> a consumer, a physical thing inherently has more value than a digital one because it keeps the value after I buy it. I can lend the book to someone legally after I'm done with it. I can sell it, trade it, or donate to a library.

For me this was true ten years ago.

The tides have shifted. Now a physical copy means: it will degrade faster than my devices (think books for children). It will take physical place, we’ll have to find it (I can ping my iPad, not my books). Depending on the country it’s printed, it might not even come to my life, the price will be double, or it will be 3 weeks after the moment I wanted to read it. It wi be in a single place, I can’t share it with my family or even my devices the way I share my amazon account. There’s a physical limit to how many I can keep: floors cracking under the load is a thing of the past.

It’d need a very compelling reason to buy any physical book at this point. I get the tradeoffs, but I had enough time with digital copies to make them work under the best conditions for me, making the upside way higher than the downsides.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#38

Post by Merrill »

Note that pricing of ebooks for libraries is higher than for consumers - https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/the-fu...

>Among the Big Five publishers (HBG, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, PRH, and S&S), pricing for one copy remains excessively high, in the $50 range for two years of library access, compared with the $15 range for perpetual access by consumers. Four of the Big Five now employ a two-year access model, which poses challenges to collection development and preservation.

Note also that ebooks come with restrictions that inhibit inter-library loans.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#39

Post by bregma »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #31
dgacmu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's entirely dependant upon volume. According to [0], the average US non-fiction book will sell under 3,000 copies in its lifetime. For the proceeds from that to pay the author, editor, and marketing... Well, that's not a lot of copies to amortize those salaries across. The numbers are obviously very different for a New York times best seller, where physical goods costs will represent a larger fraction of the cost.…

Coincidentally, it costs between $2000 and $4000 to print and market a book. So, what, say $1 per book pays for that. The rest pays the author. But wait! Authors only get a buck or two royalty per book. So why do they cost so much? Use your imagination.

> it costs between $2000 and $4000 to print and market a book

It costs between $2000 and $4000 to print a book. It costs about the same to warehouse and distribute a typical hardcover.

It costs maybe $100,000 to market a book. Often much more.

Printing, distribution, and royalties are a small part of costs in the publishing industry. Marketing and amortized overhead are a large part of the costs.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#40

Post by RyanAF7 »

Welcome to the higher education "loose leaf binder" textbooks that cost the same as the texts one used to be able to keep for decades cause it...had a spine.

The rise in price for textbooks is almost perfectly correlated with the rise in federal loan and pell grant amounts.

Steal your books, fuck those publishers.

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