plunging in

[gfish]

I know I should stay clear of Amazonfail, but I just want to say that a publisher which can't make a profit selling $9 etexts (or $5, or $2) deserves to go bankrupt. If amortized editing and design costs are really the lion's share of a physical book, the system is deeply, deeply broken.

(Even applying design costs to the etext version is largely ridiculous. How much design work does an etext need? I'd prefer it as a raw text file anyway, but a LaTeX-generated PDF would also be just fine as well. The only reason for fancy design in the first place is to catch people's attention in a store. Etext selection and browsing is nothing like that, so why bother with it in the first place? Tradition? Snob factor? Anything that can't be seen in the scaled down image of the book cover in an Amazon listing is a complete waste of money.)

I remain unconvinced of the long-term viability of selling data as a business model. But if you want to find a way for authors to make money, don't make it even harder by trying to defend these dinosaurs at the same time.

Comments

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I admit, fiction is my default model when thinking about publishing. Obviously some types of books need more layout work than others.

...on the other hand, go back a generation or two and even information-heavy works like textbooks were much, much more simply laid out. At what point is complicated modern layout just a fashion, a way for publishers to make their works stand out visually and thus charge more for them?

[beaq.livejournal.com]

More a long-desired result of more powerful and accessible layout technology, I'm thinking.

[koruja.livejournal.com]

Ah, but you are forgetting all the work that goes into putting together the indecis, appendices, glossaries, tables of content (and subsection TOCs). All of which require extensive cross-referencing, marking and formatting. Even if these things seem non-interactive in paper format, they are actually quite rich in coding on the desktop publishing level.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Wait, you *hand code* ToCs? In 2010?

The rest can be a real pain, yes. My original point was not that such work isn't needed, but that if the publishers are being honest about the price breakdown (which, as was pointed out elsethread, keeps radically changing) then it points to a radical inefficiency in their internal corporate structure.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

I've been learning about non-fiction publishing a little bit at work, at least journal-style non-fiction publishing, and the difference shocked me.

F'rinstance, did you know that more and more reputable journals--peer-review journals--are moving to a model where the author *pays* to be published? One of my doctors just submitted an article to a journal, and then discovered that it was a darned good thing she was also a subscriber (at over $250/year) because if she hadn't been, the journal would have charged her over $250 *per page* to print her article. After insisting that she turn copyright over to them.

When satyrblade publishes an article in Realms of Fantasy or Witches & Pagans, he gets paid for it, AND he gets to keep ownership of the rights.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Print academic journal publishing is so obviously a racket that it's not a useful reference for discussing the market for ordinary books. I certainly hope the big academic journal publishers die out soon, because they add almost nothing to the system.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I'm glad my field pretty much ignores journals entirely. All the action in CS is in conference publications, which have a much saner turn-around time. And even then, you just read them on a PDF. The conferences don't bother printing them anymore, and usually you just grab a copy from the author's site directly. Which means they're all edited and graphic designed by the author (unless they come from a very rich organization). Which means some could certainly be better, but it's still a working model.

[pielology.livejournal.com]

"Moving to"? Pay-to-publish has been standard in the sciences for a long time. The current revolutionary new academic publishing model involves allowing authors to pay *even more* so that the general public will be able to read their article without paying $30.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Actually, there's a sound physiological reason behind graphic design:

The human eye registers monotony when confronted with large masses of unbroken text or similar images. The human mind becomes fatigued after too much monotony. The human body experiences physical fatigue when spending large amounts of time with mental monotony. The human mind processes information more slowly and with a greater chance of error when bored and fatigued.

A well-done graphic design does more than just make pretty pictures. It also allows for higher degrees of mental processing, stimulates greater interaction between alpha and beta-wave brain activity (cf. biologist Leonard Shlain's book The Alphabet Verses the Goddess), and facilitates more interaction between the physical body and the active mind. This, in turn, promotes greater attention to, and retention of, the material involved.

BAD graphic design, on the other hand, actively causes mental and physical fatigue, either through boredom, confusion, or both.

"Aesthetics" involves more than just an emotional response (although such responses themselves are physiological in nature); when understood and properly applied, the art-science of aesthetics actively helps the human animal/ machine function more effectively.

And - as with writing - the skills, knowledge, insight and experience that separate a good graphic designer from a bad one are taught, learned and promoted in a professional environment.