I disagree with you on this one, Jay. If I buy a hardback book, I am buying both the physical artifact and the informational content. A paperback book is another physical artifact, which means I have to purchase that separately, even if I already have the informational content. An audiobook represents both the informational content and the performance of the reader, and may also represent a material artifact, if we're discussing, say, a cassette or DVD. Similar for a film; there are performance and recording costs, and a possible material artifact.

An ebook, OTOH, is *nothing but* informational content. Unless you're trying to claim that you do all your work directly on paper and *only* on paper, and thus have to do a monumental data-entry task to put your work into electronic format, the effort of copying your text file to an ebook format is somewhere between minimal and nothing at all.

best,

Joel

the effort of copying your text file to an ebook format is somewhere between minimal and nothing at all.

A widespread understanding that simply isn't true. This is one of this business facts that doesn't pass the common sense test, but is nonetheless the case.

Only about 10% of the cover price of a print book is a function of print costs and distribution. Ebooks share the same aquisition, editorial, marketing, and royalty costs as any other edition. They do have some conversion and distributioon costs, which partially offset the savings from print production and shipping. Not to mention the IT systems for indexing, distribution, long term storage and rights management.

So while there's no incremental cost for digital distribution, there are plenty of other costs that have to be accounted for in the ebook sell-through. And given that current ebook numbers are well less than 10% of print numbers for the vast majority of authors, those costs get borne out of proportion on a per-unit basis.

In other words, it's a lot more complex, and costly, than common sense about "the effort of copying your text file" would suggest.

Every time someone says "copying your text file to an ebook format is minimal" my teeth gnash.

As part of Book View Cafe, an author's collective where we make backlist work available for a nominal fee or, in many cases, for free, I can tell you that the effort of transferring my text files to electronic format is not trivial. If you work in Word, it involves stripping out all the Word code, then going through and reformatting the work in the program we're using for the site.

For people who are selling their work for multiple platforms (Kindle, Nook, PDF, mobile phone, etc.) it's that many times more non-trivial (and frankly, part of the reason I haven't started selling my backlist this way is just this: I don't anticipate the coding and recoding of my work with any particular joy). I want to have my backlist out there working for me--God knows some of my older stuff could have made me a grandparent by now--but it's not going to take a trivial investment of time and energy to make it happen.

Is an ebook really different from an MP3?

I buy a CD and rip it. I can now listen to my music on my computer and media player and I have paid for it. No ethical problems. In this case I rip it myself because it is easy.

I buy a CD and download the files instead of ripping myself. I can now listen to my music on my computer and media player and I have paid for it. Ethical issues are a little more murky, but in the end it is the same thing as if I had ripped it myself. The music was paid for.

Do you agree or disagree with the previous two statements? Do you listen to music on a media player which you did not purchase separately?

Now: I buy a hardback book. Is an electronic copy of that book in some way ethically different than an MP3 where I also own the CD? Yes, unlike ripping a CD, scanning a book is difficult and requires special equipment many people do not use. But is it ethically different?

My opinion? Ethically, getting a free electronic copy of a book I already own is a better bet than buying a used book because the author and publisher get a cut. Yet used books are not widely considered an ethical problem and how many of us have never purchased a used book?

All that said? I am purchasing ebooks even if I own physical copies right now and I haven't downloaded anything which isn't CC licensed. Why? I'd rather be on the side of the angels in this debate.

But I'm still concerned that many people are delineating books from other media in ways that are not warranted.

It seems there's a mismatch in expectations here. An ebook is a file, just like an MP3, just like an application program, just like your tax information, etc. But... analog and digital sound information can be converted relatively simply. Sure, you could do added value like remastering, or re-equalization, or optimizing compression, but that's not required.

The equivalent to ripping a CD to an MP3 would be to scan your physical book into a series of JPEGs. Ever try to read documents as JPEGs? Ever try to re-size them to fit various aspect ratios and screen sizes for different reader programs and ebook readers? Not an efficient system.

Just taking a Word document and "printing" to Acrobat to create a PDF file isn't a clean 1:1 process. Because of the vagaries of printer drivers, I often have to reformat documents to create PDF versions -- and I'm just talking about Physics exams and solutions. And that's just one of the re-formatting and production options.

Finally, if there's a difference in the production method such that the average person can't do it themselves, then why would there be no ethical difference? And how does your taking of a "free" electronic copy give a cut to the author and the publisher? Yes, they got a cut when you bought the physical copy, but your taking of an additional "free" electronic copy when they offer an ebook for sale is not giving a cut to the author and the publisher.

I think a lot of people are trying to use arguments to justify whatever they're doing, no matter what. When I was in college, lots of people would make cassettes off of one LP, claiming that the artists and the record company were already paid -- once. I'm not a big fan of some of the hysteria regarding piracy, but that's not a blanket Get Out Of Jail Free card to one and all, either.

Dr. Phil

Well, maybe publishers need to figure out a cheaper way to do this?

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/11/homebrew-300-book-sc.html

Pardon me while I think out loud here. I'm undecided about the subject and, having neither purchased nor read an ebook to date, I'm largely just watching from the sidelines.

Editorial expense is a sunk cost, regardless of whether you print one book or one million (and, presumably, whether you issue an ebook edition or not).

If a publisher is planning on releasing an ebook version, do they increase the marketing budget for the title by 10%?

Royalty fees are the most obvious incremental cost when it comes to ebooks. Nothing to argue with here: Do you want your favourite author to get paid when you download an ebook? Buy it from an official distribution channel (or send them a cheque).

Adjusting the layout for ebooks is also going to cost, but again -- doesn't scale linearly with the number of units sold. I also take issue with madrobins' objection regarding reformatting. This is most definitely something that can be automated.

IT infrastructure costs are not insignificant, but again, aren't linear. Your server can and network connection handle up to x thousands of connections per day. If you expect to have higher peaks and *really* want to capture the potential lost sales, you'll need two servers, or five, or fifty. It's a question of weighing the expense against the extra income gained at the crest of the wave of sales (new release, successful marketing campaign, mass hypnotism...).
But load balancing isn't a new problem, and what might be unreasonable expense for one book is much more acceptable when you're publishing fifty a year.

I'd be curious to


Bandwidth isn't free. It's only nearly so. I don't have the figures from the corporate end of things (not surprisingly, no one will disclose those), but let's count. Suppose you're selling 1 million ebooks in a month. You're serving up five pages do to so, in addition to the ebook itself: A search page, a book information page, a shopping cart page, a billing information page, and a purchase confirmation/download page.

Let's say these average 750KB, with all the images and scripts and whatnot. Let's say the ebook itself was 500KB (pretty heavy for an ebook, innit?). Each transaction, then, consumes roughly 4.25MB of bandwidth. In a month, you've used up just over 4 gigs.

On the more brutal, unreasonably outdated, *retail* pricing schemes I've seen, 1GB of overage tended to cost $1. Suppose my ballpark estimates are off by a factor of 10: The bandwidth expenses are now up to $40 a month for a million sales, or 0.004 cents per sale. Why are we even talking about bandwidth as a cost?

Indexing I can't say much about, having never dealt with large databases in a corporate environment. I know it's not easy, but I (once again) expect the cost to not scale linearly with the number of sales.

Long-term storage is a tricky one: Presumably the publisher is already storing and backing up all the electronic versions of their authors' backlist. The cost of doing so is most certainly not going to double for two different editions, nor quadruple for four. Backup infrastructure isn't cheap, but once it's in place, additional storage space is in the range of cents per gigabyte per year.

But the biggest question I'm wondering about is this: Is it reasonable for the publisher to use ebook sales to further amortize and spread the costs incurred on the print edition? The two are different products.

Is it reasonable for the publisher to use ebook sales to further amortize and spread the costs incurred on the print edition? The two are different products.

Well, unless you assume that ebook sales are entirely gravy and have no effect whatsoever on total print sales and never will, then absolutely you have to project total costs across total sales. If the ebook edition means you sell twenty percent fewer paper copies (percentage picked at random) then it needs to cover something like twenty percent of expenses or pretty soon the publisher goes out of business.

Have you seen evidence of ebook sales negatively impacting print sales? (not being snarky -- just because I haven't seen it doesn't mean it isn't out there).

That said, if ebooks account for 10% of sales, as per Jay and others, and the publisher sees a decline in print sales in excess of that number, the publisher is already in trouble, and should be dropping ebooks like a hot potato.

What I would like to know is the cost of a publication run with ebooks vs. the cost of the same run without ebooks. Have the costs increased by 10%? Have they remained unchanged? Have they decreased?

To put it in a different context, does McDonald's calculate the profitability of Chicken McNuggets based on the combined sales of these and the McFlurries?

I don't think that the McDonald's comparison works, because I don't think that ebooks and print books are fundamentally different products, but rather are different modes of packaging the same product.

As for whether paper book sales are being cannibalized, by ebooks, I have no definitive data*. It's possible that ebooks sales are all gravy, but certainly one of the arguments I keep seeing people making is that publishers need to get on board with ebooks because they're going to replace print books or at least some significant portion of print books. If that's the case ebooks are going to have support some share of the total costs of producing books or there won't be any publishers to create the ebooks.

It may well turn out to be the case that the price consumers are willing to pay for ebooks is below the cost of producing them. In which case either people will have to come up with a cheaper way of producing the books or a lot of the publishing industry, including authors, will end up having to look for other work. I don't think the latter is a good outcome for either readers or publishers, but I think it's one with a non-zero probability.

*Possible indicators that there may be some cannibalizing of sales would include: A) publishers are certainly acting as though they are or at least as though they expect it to happen shortly. B) I have readers who say they've switched from buying my paper books to buying my ebooks, which means that at least some of my books that would have been sold in paper form are now being sold as ebooks—of course that's anecdote, not data. C)?

Here's why I am categorizing ebooks as a different product, rather than different packaging:

1) Different distribution channels
2) Different expertise needed to produce the product (IT expertise, mainly, the other work being largely shared between print and electronic)
3) Different audience -- as you said, some of your readers are reporting a preference for ebooks. I'm interpreting this to mean that ebooks are serving their needs better in some way. Yes, the information is the same, but the difference is far greater than one between a hardcover and a paperback edition. How the reader interacts with a book is very different from how one interacts with an ebook reader.

Is that enough to classify ebooks as a different product? I believe so, but I'm not exactly working from an official definition of "product" here.

I'm also very curious as to your experience as an author: Have you seen a significant difference in sales figures for your books, between ones that had an ebook version and ones that didn't have one? I realize that it's very difficult to compare and there's no way to make it a controlled experiment, but was there anything that made you go "yep, that's a change due to the ebook"?

(I apologize for prying in advance if that's something you don't wish to disclose)

No worries on prying, though I'm not a good test case there for two reasons. 1) At this point all of my books have ebook editions—they started releasing at the same time as the paper editions with book 3 and at about that same time they released ebook editions of the first two. 2) I'm low enough in the mid-list that with my total sales numbers (in the lowish 5 figures for paper sales and high hundreds for ebooks) that it would be really hard to tell much at the detail level of my royalty statement. That's pretty much why I phrased my experience with readers as anecdotal. Some subset of my readers was delighted when books 1 and 2 were reissued and ditched their paper copies in favor of ebooks as well as buying the ebooks exclusively going forward but the sample size is too small to make any real judgments.

On the separate products front, I see the argument your making, but it doesn't work well from where I'm sitting. For me, and up through my editor, copyeditors, and proofreaders at least, the product is the story that comes off my laptop. It's not until you get at least three or four people out from me that it starts to diverge into differing distribution channels.

For that matter as someone who has reads both paper and (much less often) ebooks, at the point where it goes from words embedded in a medium to story flowing into my brain I don't much care about distribution channels either. If I were to plot how it looks in process to me you'd get a straight line across ~4 points (initial production), which would diverge into two lines for about 3 points (finishing, distribution, and sales) and then reconverge for the last 2 points (delivery and consumption).

I'll state my bias: I'm an interface geek. Those little things that occasionally annoy you about your microwave, your TV remote, or your cellphone? Bug the crap out of me. So it's entirely possible I'm giving more importance to the product interaction than the average user. (I prefer to think I'm just more consciously aware of the issues than the average user, who will just end up with a vague sense of dissatisfaction if the interaction isn't quite right)

With that in mind, I don't agree that consumption is the same for print and ebooks. The differences in how many books a reader can have on hand at a given time, how careful one must be with the book as it is embodied in the reader, the visceral experience of flipping pages, the ability to read in low light or total darkness with backlit devices... All of these change the reader's experience in very significant ways.

I'm also not sure I understand your saying the two lines converge at delivery, possibly because I'm interpreting delivery to mean something different. But if you mean the process of getting the purchased product into the reader's hands, then I must disagree in part: ebooks have a very powerful advantage over print in that they're able to offer instant gratification and the convenience of one's computer chair. Online print book retailers can't offer the instantaneity and physical storefronts can't offer the convenience.

I mean once delivery has happened I end up with a book. For me ebook vs. paper book isn't really a huge difference in terms of managing the item. I pick up the book--either by opening my laptop or by picking up the paperback and I read. With both I can read in bed or on the couch or down in the park.

I understand the argument you're making. I just don't agree with it. As far as I'm concerned the product is the story because that's the bit that's non-interchangable. A Jay Lake story is not a Kelly McCullough story is not a Charlie Stross story. For me at least, everything beyond the story is delivery/storage system not product.

Is it then unethical of me to scan the book run it through OCR and put it on my computer? I'm not sharing it or distributing it in any way.

Nope. That's a personal copy for individual use, which is Fair Use under copyright law. It would be unethical (and illegal) to distribute that scanned copy to others, however.

What about to other people that had also purchased a real copy of the book?

Not what the law says. Fair Use copying is for personal use only.

Legal and ethical aren't really the same standard.

There are legal things that are unethical, and ethical things that are illegal, so switching back and forth is confusing. :)

I was gonna say something similar. His original post above was about the ethics of this and now he's switching to nitpicking about legalities.

Sorry Jay, but, and this is just my perception, obviously, whenever you post about this, due to your being a writer, it's hard for me to not think your views are influenced more by how this impacts your sales rather than your usual logic.

In other words, you seem to have a bit of a blind spot here.

Jay is not switching back and forth. His original post contained the question "Why is it ethical for you to pirate the ebook?"

Piracy is illegal. Breaking the law is unethical. I have never read anything here written my Jay that tortures the logic of those two statements. It is not Jay that has a blind spot.

Cost aside, even if an author decides to provide their creations for free it is still illegal for anyone else to do so without permission from the author. Doing so...and doing so is called piracy...is illegal.

One of the arguments for "ebooks should be free" that really confuses me is the "I own another copy in hardback (paperback, whatever) therefore the ebook should be free." Yet, when confronted with the supposition that if the consumer has purchased one hardback, does that entitle them to another hardback for free? Most answer a resounding NO, and the reason is the cost to produce the second book. Well, there are costs with producing an ebook, as Jay has pointed out in this and other posts (and links to industry experts' pages and posts.)

On the topic of converting formatted text from one software platform to another, even Microsoft and Adobe can not guarantee a clean conversion between different version of the same product. I know this because doing this has been part of my Daye Jobbe for two decades. Each conversion to going to take work effort, and in the professional world that means a line editor and likely a copy editor skilled in the conversion process and the target software platform.
Rant over...

-Deven

"Breaking the law is unethical."

Guess we'll just have to disagree on that.

"Breaking the law is unethical."

This is certainly not universally the case. It's so often not the case that I think you'd have to show it on a case by case basis.

I'm somewhat sensitive to claims of personal-gain-bias, since I was told for years that I was only anti-copyright because I hadn't actually created anything. These claims stopped being made after I ran a small ISV for a while, but I still think it's not really germane to bring it up. After all, there are people on both sides of the issue: Any bias Jay Lake has should be shared by Cory Doctorow, so where they differ, that's not really the main factor.

I really could care less about this law. Current copyright laws have been passed by bought and paid for politicians to totally favor business.

I thought you were talking about what was right, not what was legal.

I appreciate the difference between law and ethics. I also very clearly have a strong bias in this discussion. In this case, however, I do think they roughly align. I don't think it's right to copy something you haven't paid for. It also happens to be illegal.

Since I'm personally acquainted with ebook publishing, I know exactly how much work goes into preparing a file for release. When people say "Oh, it's just an ebook" it makes my blood boil. As a content editor I would have reviewed any book I work on multiple times. That's translated to hours of my life I could have been doing other things, like gardening, or spending time with friends.

But I edit books, many of which are only released as assorted digital files for reading devices.

Why? I'm passionate about stories. And when I buy an ebook, I do so because it's my way of paying tribute to the author, editor and publisher who have worked hard to ready this file for me.

I buy the right to read this work and I'm happy to do so since my few dollars are a way of saying thank you.

People 'in the biz' say stuff like this, but then I see a book like this http://www.amazon.com/Long-Walk-Story-Freedom-ebook/dp/B002SQKQHQ/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I1G40B5FV7QV3T&colid=16P23UUC5WVYH on Amazon.

$10 for a 50+ year old book that has sold over half a million copies already. You really expect me to believe they need to charge such an outrageous price to recoup their editing investment?

If publishers want to charge stupid high prices for new ebooks, fine, then lower the costs of old ebooks to something reasonable.

Ah, nevermind, I'm just repeating myself from earlier posts on this subject here. Whatever.

I agree prices should be kept reasonable, after all the overheads from printing costs aren't there. There are certain vendors who charge the same that one would pay for a printed book, and that I disagree with. The whole idea is to pass some of the advantage onto the reader, otherwise what's the point.

But I don't agree ebooks should be free. If people don't pay for an item, chances are they won't value it. I've lost count of the free 'zines on my "to read" pile yet when I pay $5 for an ebook by one of my favourite authors, I tend to read it almost immediately.

If people don't pay for an item, chances are they won't value it.

I'll agree, but expand this to: If peole don't pay a price for an item that's close to what they expect its worth to be, they won't value it. There is a story of a software developer who tried selling an enterprize-level product to companies at $500 a license. No one would talk to him. Then someone advised him to set the price at $5000 a license, and suddenly he started seeing a lot more interest from the customers. $500 was so far off from what they'd normally pay, they assumed it was an inferior product and not worth their time.

All that said, charging money just so people appreciate the purchase is a really bad reason to charge money. If I paid $5 (or $2 even) for something that I completely dislike, I'll be much more annoyed -- and unlikely to revisit the author's work -- than if I got it for free. People will appreciate the transaction, but I'm not convinced that translates to them appreciating the product.

Would your attitude to the free zines have been different if your downloading of one was strongly linked to a "pay what you can" donation button?

This is a discussion that has gone on in the art world in a sideline way since the beginning of digitial art making and mxied media including digital images. As yet, there are no clear answers.

However, and surely there are enough technologically sensitive people on this blog to know this, the concerns about the current difficulties in maintaining formating and other problems with converting books to digital/digital to print, will be solved and relatively quickly. How long did it take for similar tech to be developed for other media? Films, photography, music?

Print is behind the curve, but it will be there and soon.

So personally, I consider the arguments about how difficult it is to make the physical change between media moot. It's gonna happen, people will have access.

Best figure out your logical arguments first for the times, they are a'changin'.

Why are books different from music if the costs to rip a book are no different from ripping a song?

Who should decide the price points?

If films can make money, why can't books make money, and how can the models be compared?

I have no answers. I'm deeply interested.

What I know is the art world is one fucked up mess over this stuff.

Best get the literary world's act together so writers don't end up disenfranchised like the majority of visual artists.

It's not ethical. I don't care how anyone tries to pretty it up, stealing is stealing. Why is it supposed to be acceptable just because you bought the book in hardcover or paperback? I have gone to an antique store in the past and found strip cover books for sale. Well hello there copyright infringement! I went to management, they were removed from the salefloor while I was still there. To my thinking, strip cover books and pirated e books are the same thing, because no one got paid for the content.