Trae is an Engineer, Lover, Amateur Cyclist, and Social Titan (well at least a Demigod) from Texas. He is also often found exaggerating any information about himself, but can you blame him?

Trae vents his mind here at the Blogazine and his mini-blog, as well as chronicles his fight to lose weight on his bicycle at Breaking the Bike. Follow all of Trae's activity or shoot him a . He loves you...
  • bisign
  • myparentswereawesome
  • fuckyeahscrubs
  • dbsw
  • legos
  • vrilamity
  • lookatthisfuckinghipster
  • whitesnuggie
  • dropoff
  • one-twenty-five
  • bobulate
  • azizisbored
  • moltz
  • theyahooanswers
  • emilyhansen
  • ilovecharts
  • goodbyeformerself
  • beeriety
  • ninetydays
  • makingofmovies
  • ihatemyparents
  • hrrrthrrr
  • thinnerpeace
  • merlin
  • slaughterhouse90210
  • sqpeg
  • jakeandamir
  • bendoeslife
  • fuckyeahbeer
  • sweetshwiga
  • staff
  • mrgan
  • thisiswhyyourefat
  • letterheady
  • pwinn
  • aquaticgiraffeproductions
  • oldjewstellingjokes
  • peopleof
  • happiestpeopleever
  • bullshit
  • drew
  • oumatt
  • joelaz
  • mattmcinerney
  • ckck
  • matthewb
  • gary
  • ohyeahfacts
  • prettify
  • garfieldminusgarfield
  • copycats
  • eddoeslife
  • forgottentoothbrush
  • breakingthebike
  • instapaper
  • laserportraits
  • whatannoysus
  • dailydropcap
  • stuffmygirlfriendsays
  • yourmonkeycalled
  • sadguysontradingfloors
  • redesignrelated
  • cubicle17
  • lennylimbo
  • fancyfastfood
  • egrossnickle
  • absoluticris
  • keggersofyore
  • hohoweight
  • dunk3d
  • artofthearcade
  • totallyrobot
  • ilikethepartwhere
  • massivetruth
  • tolivehealthy

Making the Case for E-Book Prices

I posted this over at NookTalk but wanted to make a few comments here.

This article emphasizes that a structured pricing plan is good all around when it come to eBooks. (My plan says eBooks should cost around 75% of the cheapest retail price available for the print copy. So if B&N sells a Hardcover for $20, then the eBook should be <=$15. If the Mass Market Paperback is available for $7, then the eBook should be <=$5.25.) Here’s the way it breaks down:

Hardcover - $26 (consumer’s cost)
Publisher’s Paid: $13
Author Royalty: $3.90
Printing, Storage, Shipping: $3.25
Design, Typesetting, Editing: $0.80
Marketing: $1
Publisher’s Profit: $4.05 (before overhead operational costs: offices, warehouses, electricity, etc.)

eBook - $12.99 (consumer’s cost)
Publisher’s Paid: $9.09
Author’s Royalty: $2.27-$3.25
Digitizing, Typesetting, editing: $0.50
Marketing: $0.78
Publisher’s Profit: $4.56-$5.54

eBook - $9.99 (consumer’s cost - Amazon model)
Publisher’s Paid: $6.99
Author’s Royalty: $1.75-$2.50
Digitizing, Typesetting, editing: $0.38
Marketing: $0.60
Publisher’s Profit: $3.51-$4.26

All this shows that the Publishers make more money from the eBook market (although Authors are getting reduced royalties). And what the NYTimes doesn’t employ is the change based on when the book goes to paperback. Where Design, typesetting, editing are once again needed for the paperback, the eBook is still ok in it’s current form. Also assuming that the paperback needs little to no marketing as well, prices fall dramatically.

Mass Market Paperback - $8
Publisher’s Paid: $4 (per 50% model illustrated in NYT’s article)
Author’s Royalty: $1.40-$2
Printing, Storage, Shipping: $.8-$1 (assumed % from NYT model, dropped 20% for reduced shipping [arbitrary])
Design, Typesetting, editing: $0.75 (assumed similar, but slightly cheaper since design is reworked for MM Paperbacks)
Marketing: $0 (no marketing done for paperbacks)
Publisher’s Profit: $0.25-$1.05

eBook - $5.99 (consumer’s cost for a $7.99 mass market paperback)
Publisher’s Paid: $4.19 (based on NYT’s 70% price point)
Author’s Royalty: $1.05-$1.50 (based on NYT’s 17.5%-25% numbers)
Digitizing, Typesetting, editing: $0 (done during hardcover release, no changes necessary)
Marketing: $0 (assumed none for paperbacks)
Publisher’s Profit: $2.69-$3.14 (Much higher profit margin!!!)

I think most people here don’t mind the higher prices up front (ie $12-$14 for brand new books) that’s only expected. But sticking to the $9.99 as a blanket need is a joke. And if publishers looked at things in the big picture I can’t believe they wouldn’t see this too. Right now they’d be making more off the eBook than their print books. The only people that get screwed regardless are the authors, which is a shame and I’d assume that they’d renegotiate their royalty structure in eBooks became the dominate form of delivery. Which would put the profits to the publishers once again around what they are getting for print books. The only paragraph in the article I have an issue with is that publishers claim they make up much of any losses from the Hardcover edition in the paperback edition. It’s difficult if they only make ~$4 off of a Hardcover, and expect to make more from a $8 retail paperback…assuming they only receive a wholesale price for those books as well. I can’t see B&N paying $6, $7, or $8 for a book that they will sell at $8-ish.

BUT, again what’s not thought about in any article talking about publishers and eBooks is the market for used books and the ability for eBooks to take market share away from the used book market. I want cheap books. Let me give you a for instance. B&N had Shutter Island for cheap (~$4) the other day. I bought it for my wife to read (and for me later). My wife is a huge library fan so, if it wouldn’t have been so cheap, she’d have found it at the library and read it. But now, B&N, William Morrow (pub), and Dennis Lehane (auth) got a little scratch from me instead of the nothing they’d receive from her library visit. Or if I wanted purchase the book, a trip to Half Price Books or an Amazon Marketplace purchase second hand would have been what I did, instead I bought the book in the way that put money in their hands. I might be a little in the dark, but with the data I’ve seen this is a win-win-win-draw for publishers, retailers, consumers, then authors (meaning authors will need to renegotiate so it’s not a total loss for them). Am I wrong?

Book Publishers push for Higher Prices

My belief…is that this hurts publishers in the end. Look at the movie industry. 2009 was really the first year certain things blew up.

  1. Netflix Streaming became really popular (not only from the Roku box, but all the other devices that now support it.)
  2. RedBox, DVDPlay, etc. could be found everywhere (including some rural towns)
  3. Most movies were released with Digital Downloads
  4. Ease of digital renting (iTunes, Amazon, Video OnDemand, etc.)

As a result, 2009 was a turning point in the movie industry’s slagging profits, and movie piracy slowed (not mutually inclusive). Now with the industry forcing Netflix, RedBox, etc to a 28-day waiting period, I would be willing to bet that the industry slows again, and piracy increases as well.

For the book publishers, $9.99 is still in my mind a barrier of entry when it comes to eBooks. $6-$7 is where I feel comfortable in purchasing the book. Now the eBook readers are fairly prolific (ie like the iPod became), people will start going to other sources (ie piracy, etc.) to find their digital books, much like what was done before the iTunes Store. $15 for a digital book is absurd. Take Ozzy Osbourne’s Hachette published book, I Am Ozzy. It’s $14.47 for the hardcover. Printing costs money and binding costs money. $15 for a hardcover is not bad. The Kindle price is $9.99. To me that’s pushing the limits on price, and tells me that I won’t buy it. Digital (which takes little in mass-production costs) should be extremely cheap. Secondly, Take James Rollins’ The Doomsday Key. Paperback from Amazon is $9.99, Kindle edition? $9.99. That’s even more ludicrous. This is one case where book publishers are completely blind. I think new releases are able to be sold (digitally) at around $10. But after a few months time they should drastically reduce, think 1/2 current retail price (not MSRP). Then when the paperback comes out it should be reduced again to 1/2 current paperback retail price (not MSRP). Then when the Mass-Market Paperback comes out, it should go down once more.

What publishers don’t realize is that the reduction in price means more sales. That’s the point of the MM Paperbacks! Why can’t they see this in eBooks? They just don’t understand that digital sales should follow the same model, they feel if they sell it for less than the actual book it cheapens the product…which it does not. Bad writing cheapens the product. I used to by books all the time off of the “Clearance” racks at Hastings, books I would have never purchased and read otherwise. The price was the reason that sale was made, not how it was marketed and original pricing scheme.

DIY: The Amazon Way

This is a quality view from someone that a little Apple-bias, but does tend to stay very objective.  I like to hear about these things and the fact that many people can now self-publish into Amazon. I’d be interested to know how Neven feels about Barnes and Noble’s approach. Which involves creating an EPUB format on your own, then becoming a “Vendor of Record”, then listing your book. Or using Sterling Publishing which isn’t self-publishing at all. Make you think. I’m still trying to decide Kindle or Nook?!?!?!

mrgan:

After I expressed my desire for Apple to enter the world of self-publishing, several people pointed out that Amazon already does this via Digital Text Platform (DTP, har-har), a beta program connected to the Kindle store. I had heard of this and taken a cursory glance, but I hadn’t tried using it. So, in the interest of research, I started the process of publishing my first work on it three days ago. I picked a short story to publish, one you may have already seen on this blog. (‘The Antebellum’)

The process was a bit goofy, but overall, the thing was usable (there were a few micro-boners along the way - Amazon pretends they don’t know who I am or where I live, despite my being logged in; book art can’t be in PNG or compressed-TIFF format; the preferred file format is MS Word.)

I was given precious few options regarding formatting: the RTF I uploaded was “converted” and I was given a preview, but there was no mention of templates, additional info pages, or any sort of typographic considerations. I understand that I could’ve handled some of that in my text editor before uploading, but Kindle flows the text in its own funky way. Perhaps pitfalls and best practices are explained somewhere on the straight-from-the-90s Amazon DTP Support site, but I had better knives to stick in my eyeballs that night. (Cameron Hunt points out that John August wrote on Kindle formatting; this is helpful, and it shows just how few options you get.) A downloadable layout/preview app would certainly be helpful.

So while I can’t tell you conclusively what sort of formatting will or won’t work, I can confirm that presentation of content is not a high priority in this DTP business. That is one area I would expect Apple to excel in; sort of how you have to try hard to make an ugly slideshow in iPhoto.

The approval process takes 24-72 hours, Amazon says. My story was up for sale in 16 hours or so; kudos, theoretical Amazon employees who vetted me. And hey, I wasn’t asked to give the book an age rating, nor did it get one automatically, nor does Amazon seem to rate books at all. As someone who read J. G. Ballard’s Crash at the age of thirteen and lived to be fairly normal, I’m not concerned for the safety of our children; I’m just surprised.

So, overall, I have to admit this whole self-publishing thing was pretty effortless. It’s true that Amazon now takes 70% of the profits, and the final formatting does drive me nuts, but I’m not really thinking about all that too much right now because here’s what I am thinking about, here’s the thing that was confirmed for me:

It is really, really cool to search a world-famous bookstore and see your book listed.

This can be done better; the upload system needs to be so tempting, you’re more likely to use it than to not use it. Layout control needs improvement or, errr, any implementation at all (I don’t know how I would even begin to go about publishing a graphic novel.) And the very idea that you, yeah you reading this, can publish that piece of writing you’ve been sitting on, well that needs to be keynoted in Jobsian fashion.

Amazon has done a surprisingly nice job with DTP, but it still feels like a Nomad to the iPod Apple could put together. The Kindle is really good for reading text, but it doesn’t even attempt to seriously handle anything with graphics (photos, graphs, illustrations) and trust me, people love graphics. That’s exactly why it would be great for Apple to claim that space right away and out-wow Amazon instead of just competing with yet another way to read .rtf. Beautifully interactive visuals is where it’s at (he said, making a buttload of assumptions.)

Here’s a quick thought experiment: when the tablet keynote turns to music, do you think they’ll focus on: a) the Now Playing screen, b) CoverFlow, or c) iTunes LP? (Also, I partly blame the lack of excitement around the Apple TV on the seen-it-before quality of the content it offered when it was introduced; had it launched with movie extras and a game or two…)

So then, in conclusion: nicely done Amazon; now go beat them, Apple.

You can buy your very own Kindle copy of my short story ‘The Antebellum’ here (or read it here, blog-style). 2,000 words, 99 cents. Thanks!

Term Limits by Vince Flynn

Just finished this book. I really liked it but for some reason it took me a long time to get into. The first half of the book is a roller coaster ride in terms of action, with the valleys lasting just a little too long.

I think the best thing about this book is that it deals with things that are pretty near and dear these days. Radical spending in Washington, people making decisions that are solely based on gaining and sustaining power not what’s best for the country, and a two party system that has completely polarized our nation. Someone decides to take matters into their own hand. Flynn does a decent job of balancing approval for vigilante justice with doing what’s right under the law. I can’t say he hid the side of the argument he stands on, but keeps things manageable.

The story doesn’t present itself well to be something that is all action all the time, but even so you can tell Flynn tried to keep a stream of action coming. My one complaint is that at times felt very labored and drug on when getting from one major plot point to the next.

Term Limits is a good book. I would expect that many strong liberal minded readers would not appreciate the story, but I would still encourage a read.

This library is amazing. The only thing that would make it cooler is if the celing was twice as high and there were ladders that rolled along the shelves. moltz: Neil Gaiman’s library - Boing Boing I hate to reblog Boing Boing because Cory Doctorow thinks DRM is THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD (actually, I kid Cory, I just hate to reblog it because I assume everyone’s already read it), but holy crap, Neil Gaiman.

This library is amazing. The only thing that would make it cooler is if the celing was twice as high and there were ladders that rolled along the shelves.

moltz:

Neil Gaiman’s library - Boing Boing

I hate to reblog Boing Boing because Cory Doctorow thinks DRM is THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD (actually, I kid Cory, I just hate to reblog it because I assume everyone’s already read it), but holy crap, Neil Gaiman.