20 ms·

I have a small pile of friends in publishing, so I'll take this from the other side. The reasons for the publishers' apparent insanity are: * Contrary to popu

by kevinr 11y ago

I have a small pile of friends in publishing, so I'll take this from the other side. The reasons for the publishers' apparent insanity are: * Contrary to popular belief, physical production is NOT the single largest part of a book's cost. In fact, even before ebooks, the cost of paper and ink and shipping was actually a pretty negligible part of the final cost. Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me. Salaries in publishing have for decades been nosing around the minimum the market will bear---as just one example, freelance proofreaders get paid a penny per word; the good ones get two. Many freelance proofreaders are also editors, copyeditors, and authors in their own right, and hustle their asses off to make incomes that, coming from tech, we wouldn't consider starvation wages. * Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not.

pgrote 11y ago
"* Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not." I think this is the number one reason. The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value. I buy a fair number of non-fiction books and loved when ebooks emerged as a viable way to buy a book at what I perceived to be a reasonable price. Now that the agency model has been in force I've just shifted how I buy ... I buy used books from Amazon. All the books I used to buy as ebooks the publisher was receiving revenue. Now, they don't receive any money from my purchases. The book publishing industry still has a window of opportunity to transition to ebooks under their own direction, but it's almost closed. See the recording industry.
- kevinr 11y ago
  > The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value. How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance? This is a serious question: just a few days ago I was suggesting that a friend, twenty published books over the last thirty years, books you may have read or heard of, start a Patreon so that he might, for the first time in his life, afford health insurance. People working full-time in publishing might have health insurance but are working for well below market (by outside of tech standards, which are pretty embarrassing) in some of the most expensive cities on earth. And they can't just move, because then they'd get converted to contract and lose their health insurance. This is not to shame you for buying used books---that's fine, there's no way I'd have the library I do without them, and I grew up groveling the library and used bookstores because that was all we could afford. Readers are readers. But---and I encounter this again and again---readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.
  - eru 11y ago
    If readers value books, but not enough to make writing pay, isn't the economic thing to stop being a professional writer?
    - kevinr 11y ago
      Or to try to convince readers to value books more.
      - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
        If I have $30 to spend on books each month, is it better to spend on one book so one author can eat well, or spend it on two books so two authors can simply eat?
        elthran 11y ago
        Or why not 4 books so I can maximize my personal enjoyment and cultural enrichment?
true_religion 11y ago
> Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me. The costs of modern day e-books are real, but for many genres markets its possible that buyers are simply willing to tolerate a book that's objectively worse (more errors, worse design, illustration by total unknowns, fonts free sources instead of foundries). Rather than continuing to participate in the traditional industry, I think a lot of authors will have to self-publish and realize that if they can't give their book the love needed to not "make your eyes bleed" then their work will fail in the marketplace. They can't rely on someone else to take a manuscript and clean it up to a publishable version anymore. There's just not space for those middlemen and helpers in a lot of genres market, unless you are a best seller.
- ghaff 11y ago
  They probably need at least a copy editor. (Typos are really annoying and you just can't deal with those without help.) But, yeah,for some genres, people with at least a niche following may do better with cutting out a lot of expensive "middlemen" who provide incremental improvement.
  - StephenConnell 11y ago
    Why can't one deal with typos, without help? It seems to me that a combination of technology and time should be sufficient. I know I have read books that seem to have missed spell check... Really annoying.
    - kevinr 11y ago
      Speaking as an occasional author, by the time I've finished the however-many drafts and several rounds of edits, I'm completely blind to the manuscript's mechanical flaws, and need someone else to point out to me the Spoonerisms, unfortunately euphemistic word choices, or even just that I've dedicated my book to "My parents, Ayn Rand and God." Also, I say again: copyeditors and proofreaders are cheap. Doing that work myself makes about as much sense as doing anything else I could outsource cheaply.
tzs 11y ago
> Contrary to popular belief, physical production is NOT the single largest part of a book's cost. In fact, even before ebooks, the cost of paper and ink and shipping was actually a pretty negligible part of the final cost. Yup. For a typical hardback, the physical costs (printing, shipping, and storing) are about $3.25. Here's an article from a few years ago that looked at the money side of paper books and ebooks: [1] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.ht...
- philfrasty 11y ago
  Given that you print a vast amount of copies and it is all black-and-white on thin paper. Go color (e.g. cookbooks) with 200g+ paper and you can easily double or triple that price.
- revelation 11y ago
  That's a massive massive part of a $15 book, then? That's about the same proportion as the parts cost for a typical electronics product.
x0x0 11y ago
And, having witnessed what happened to the music industry, the publishers are uneager to let amazon itunes them.
StefanKarpinski 11y ago
Legitimate question: what is the total cost of labor to publish a book, aside from writing it and physical production? It's hard to imagine it being more than $25k – a quarter-person's salary at $100k/year for editing, typesetting and design. At $5 per book, that's covered by 5000 sales. With ebooks, the rest is pure profit – or could go directly to the author if authors hired publishers to do that work instead of the other way around. The push to revive print books seems like a last ditch effort to preserve a model where the publishers are essential and therefore in control instead of the authors running the show.
- akie 11y ago
  I'm involved in an open access book publisher that will publish their first (academic) books this summer. Everything digital & print on demand, and the reviewing and copy editing is mostly done for free by other academics. Professional typesetting though, and I do think they pay someone for helping with editing. All in all, this brings us to a cost of €3000 to €5000 per book.
  - ylem 11y ago
    Is that the fixed cost/book? What field(s) are you publishing in?
- grey-area 11y ago
  This might be a little out of date, but the breakdown is something like 40% retailer, 10% distribution, 10% print, 5-10% author, 10% editorial, 20% profit. On future print runs the publisher gets more profit of course. NB the retailer takes most of the profit. For ebooks the situation is worse in that Amazon takes 70% unless you choose to sell exclusively, but at least canny authors can bypass the publisher. You can see then why publishers are hostile to ebooks, for them it is an even worse deal and they lose control to a predatory retailer (Amazon). 5000 sales is larger than most first print runs, a minority of books are bestsellers and sell hundreds of thousands, the majority sell just a few thousand and make very little profit if anything, this is why publishers offer an advance set against future royalties. There is still a vestigial authority to a printed book (someone other than the author liked this) and a stigma attached to self publishing, so there is some value still to being published on paper, because the main benefit to most authors is reputational, not monetary. It will be interesting to see if that changes with ebooks. However, like print newspapers, mass-market print books are dead, they were always on thin margins but are now unsustainable. This will take a decade or two to work out, but it will happen.
avn2109 11y ago
>> "Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting" I must confess to being baffled by all this talk of typesetting, for the following reasons: 1) My ebook readers (Calibre and iBooks, mostly) algorithmically render and reflow the text to arbitrary typefaces, sizes, columnar layouts, etc. Isn't this "typesetting?" And isn't it taking place entirely in software? [0] 2) Latex consumes a plain-text (aka neither designed nor typeset) file as input and produces tolerably-good machine typeset output. Its output is vastly better than plenty of well-regarded periodicals such as [1], which proves by construction that good-enough machine typesetting can be implemented. [0] I'm not claiming iBooks typesetting is remotely comparable to what's found in a Random House hardcover, but rather that no hand typesetting at all takes place for most (all?) ebooks. [1] http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/ http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/
- dietrichepp 11y ago
  LaTeX can only do typesetting when a human operator makes it happen. Human operators for LaTeX tend to be fairly expensive, I dare you to try and hire one.
  - dragandj 11y ago
    Or could, oh, horrors, the authors, editors, and proofreaders learn to use LaTeX themselves so the typesetter could just check the final document for errors?
    - lmm 11y ago
      Division of labour tends to increase efficiency. Do you really want an author spending hours reading LaTeX tutorials, or do you want them to get on with their personal specialty and let a typesetting specialist do the typesetting? Either way the ultimate cost is going to be similar.
      - dragandj 11y ago
        But the problem is that their personal specialty is not valued much, so if they want bread on their table they better augment it with a complementary specialty.
kriro 11y ago
My counterpoint would be that marketing and selling are often done rather wrong by the big publishing houses. People care about the story behind the book and the authors, I rarely see these emphasized in the typical publisher campaigns. Much easier for a modern author to forge these relationships naturally. The other things you mentioned can also be automated to some extend (typesetting and layout for sure).
- joshvm 11y ago
  You might be interested in this Japenese bookshop - it was on HN a while ago. The proprietor only stocks one title at a time and treats the shop more like an exhibition. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/23/japanese-bookshop-stocks-only-one-book-at-a-time http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/23/japanese-booksh...

by kevinr 11y ago

pgrote 11y ago

"* Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not." I think this is the number one reason. The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value. I buy a fair number of non-fiction books and loved when ebooks emerged as a viable way to buy a book at what I perceived to be a reasonable price. Now that the agency model has been in force I've just shifted how I buy ... I buy used books from Amazon. All the books I used to buy as ebooks the publisher was receiving revenue. Now, they don't receive any money from my purchases. The book publishing industry still has a window of opportunity to transition to ebooks under their own direction, but it's almost closed. See the recording industry.

kevinr 11y ago
> The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value. How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance? This is a serious question: just a few days ago I was suggesting that a friend, twenty published books over the last thirty years, books you may have read or heard of, start a Patreon so that he might, for the first time in his life, afford health insurance. People working full-time in publishing might have health insurance but are working for well below market (by outside of tech standards, which are pretty embarrassing) in some of the most expensive cities on earth. And they can't just move, because then they'd get converted to contract and lose their health insurance. This is not to shame you for buying used books---that's fine, there's no way I'd have the library I do without them, and I grew up groveling the library and used bookstores because that was all we could afford. Readers are readers. But---and I encounter this again and again---readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.
- eru 11y ago
  If readers value books, but not enough to make writing pay, isn't the economic thing to stop being a professional writer?
  - kevinr 11y ago
    Or to try to convince readers to value books more.
    - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
      If I have $30 to spend on books each month, is it better to spend on one book so one author can eat well, or spend it on two books so two authors can simply eat?
      - elthran 11y ago
        Or why not 4 books so I can maximize my personal enjoyment and cultural enrichment?

true_religion 11y ago

> Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me. The costs of modern day e-books are real, but for many genres markets its possible that buyers are simply willing to tolerate a book that's objectively worse (more errors, worse design, illustration by total unknowns, fonts free sources instead of foundries). Rather than continuing to participate in the traditional industry, I think a lot of authors will have to self-publish and realize that if they can't give their book the love needed to not "make your eyes bleed" then their work will fail in the marketplace. They can't rely on someone else to take a manuscript and clean it up to a publishable version anymore. There's just not space for those middlemen and helpers in a lot of genres market, unless you are a best seller.

ghaff 11y ago
They probably need at least a copy editor. (Typos are really annoying and you just can't deal with those without help.) But, yeah,for some genres, people with at least a niche following may do better with cutting out a lot of expensive "middlemen" who provide incremental improvement.
- StephenConnell 11y ago
  Why can't one deal with typos, without help? It seems to me that a combination of technology and time should be sufficient. I know I have read books that seem to have missed spell check... Really annoying.
  - kevinr 11y ago
    Speaking as an occasional author, by the time I've finished the however-many drafts and several rounds of edits, I'm completely blind to the manuscript's mechanical flaws, and need someone else to point out to me the Spoonerisms, unfortunately euphemistic word choices, or even just that I've dedicated my book to "My parents, Ayn Rand and God." Also, I say again: copyeditors and proofreaders are cheap. Doing that work myself makes about as much sense as doing anything else I could outsource cheaply.

tzs 11y ago

> Contrary to popular belief, physical production is NOT the single largest part of a book's cost. In fact, even before ebooks, the cost of paper and ink and shipping was actually a pretty negligible part of the final cost. Yup. For a typical hardback, the physical costs (printing, shipping, and storing) are about $3.25. Here's an article from a few years ago that looked at the money side of paper books and ebooks: [1] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.ht...

philfrasty 11y ago
Given that you print a vast amount of copies and it is all black-and-white on thin paper. Go color (e.g. cookbooks) with 200g+ paper and you can easily double or triple that price.
revelation 11y ago
That's a massive massive part of a $15 book, then? That's about the same proportion as the parts cost for a typical electronics product.

x0x0 11y ago

And, having witnessed what happened to the music industry, the publishers are uneager to let amazon itunes them.

StefanKarpinski 11y ago

Legitimate question: what is the total cost of labor to publish a book, aside from writing it and physical production? It's hard to imagine it being more than $25k – a quarter-person's salary at $100k/year for editing, typesetting and design. At $5 per book, that's covered by 5000 sales. With ebooks, the rest is pure profit – or could go directly to the author if authors hired publishers to do that work instead of the other way around. The push to revive print books seems like a last ditch effort to preserve a model where the publishers are essential and therefore in control instead of the authors running the show.

akie 11y ago
I'm involved in an open access book publisher that will publish their first (academic) books this summer. Everything digital & print on demand, and the reviewing and copy editing is mostly done for free by other academics. Professional typesetting though, and I do think they pay someone for helping with editing. All in all, this brings us to a cost of €3000 to €5000 per book.
- ylem 11y ago
  Is that the fixed cost/book? What field(s) are you publishing in?
grey-area 11y ago
This might be a little out of date, but the breakdown is something like 40% retailer, 10% distribution, 10% print, 5-10% author, 10% editorial, 20% profit. On future print runs the publisher gets more profit of course. NB the retailer takes most of the profit. For ebooks the situation is worse in that Amazon takes 70% unless you choose to sell exclusively, but at least canny authors can bypass the publisher. You can see then why publishers are hostile to ebooks, for them it is an even worse deal and they lose control to a predatory retailer (Amazon). 5000 sales is larger than most first print runs, a minority of books are bestsellers and sell hundreds of thousands, the majority sell just a few thousand and make very little profit if anything, this is why publishers offer an advance set against future royalties. There is still a vestigial authority to a printed book (someone other than the author liked this) and a stigma attached to self publishing, so there is some value still to being published on paper, because the main benefit to most authors is reputational, not monetary. It will be interesting to see if that changes with ebooks. However, like print newspapers, mass-market print books are dead, they were always on thin margins but are now unsustainable. This will take a decade or two to work out, but it will happen.

avn2109 11y ago

>> "Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting" I must confess to being baffled by all this talk of typesetting, for the following reasons: 1) My ebook readers (Calibre and iBooks, mostly) algorithmically render and reflow the text to arbitrary typefaces, sizes, columnar layouts, etc. Isn't this "typesetting?" And isn't it taking place entirely in software? [0] 2) Latex consumes a plain-text (aka neither designed nor typeset) file as input and produces tolerably-good machine typeset output. Its output is vastly better than plenty of well-regarded periodicals such as [1], which proves by construction that good-enough machine typesetting can be implemented. [0] I'm not claiming iBooks typesetting is remotely comparable to what's found in a Random House hardcover, but rather that no hand typesetting at all takes place for most (all?) ebooks. [1] http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/ http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/

dietrichepp 11y ago
LaTeX can only do typesetting when a human operator makes it happen. Human operators for LaTeX tend to be fairly expensive, I dare you to try and hire one.
- dragandj 11y ago
  Or could, oh, horrors, the authors, editors, and proofreaders learn to use LaTeX themselves so the typesetter could just check the final document for errors?
  - lmm 11y ago
    Division of labour tends to increase efficiency. Do you really want an author spending hours reading LaTeX tutorials, or do you want them to get on with their personal specialty and let a typesetting specialist do the typesetting? Either way the ultimate cost is going to be similar.
    - dragandj 11y ago
      But the problem is that their personal specialty is not valued much, so if they want bread on their table they better augment it with a complementary specialty.

kriro 11y ago

My counterpoint would be that marketing and selling are often done rather wrong by the big publishing houses. People care about the story behind the book and the authors, I rarely see these emphasized in the typical publisher campaigns. Much easier for a modern author to forge these relationships naturally. The other things you mentioned can also be automated to some extend (typesetting and layout for sure).

joshvm 11y ago
You might be interested in this Japenese bookshop - it was on HN a while ago. The proprietor only stocks one title at a time and treats the shop more like an exhibition. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/23/japanese-bookshop-stocks-only-one-book-at-a-time http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/23/japanese-booksh...