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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.
(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.
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One issue that is going to HAVE to be dealt with effectively in order for e-books to become truly popular is this: once you buy a physical book it's yours until it falls apart, which can be decades. I have books that were my grandparents'. An e-book is only good until either the file gets corrupted, or until the new edition of your reader doesn't read the old file format.
If I buy a book, I want to be able to go on reading it for years, if I feel like it. An e-book won't give me that, not yet.
And there is also the issue of piracy. Right now e-books are pirated the moment they become available, whether they have DRM or not. DRM-free advocates insist that they want to be able to do whatever they want with their e-book once they pay for it and that publishers don't try to keep you from re-selling the physical books they produce. What they aren't addressing is the fact that physical books have rights management built in. Once you buy a physical book, you can certainly lend it to friends or sell it to someone else ... but only one person at a time. You cannot physically lend it to 10,000 people at a time, and you cannot give it to *anyone* else and still keep it for yourself.
This isn't an issue for people who create for fun, but it most certainly *is* for people who create for a living ... and let's face it; most quality work is put out by people who put effort into becoming skilled, and, just like other types of people who do skilled work, they want to be paid for producing quality work, and preferably be paid enough that they can do LOTS of quality work, and continue becoming even more skilled.
Which brings me to why self-publishing is looked down on: once the printing press was invented and became readily available, anyone who could afford one could publish their own writing ... which led to some truly execrable work. Satyr suggests you read a book called Really Bad Poems, which is a collection of poetry mostly published around that time (the 1700s). Vanity press has no quality control, which leads to exactly the quality you'd expect--none. Which is why self-publishing is looked down on. One way to create a better product is to put quality control in place; in the case of writing that means several different kinds of editing ... and most authors just do not have those skills OR the willpower to use them on their beloved children. And if you want to get paid for having THOSE skills, you have to go to someone who utilizes them--a publishing company. (I have a friend who does freelance editing; she doesn't really get enough business to eat on.) So, the one reliable source for quality writing is ... publishing houses. Because that's where the editors are.
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Piracy also solves your final problem. Quality control isn't a problem if the content is free! Just keep downloading until you find something you like. That sounds flippant, but it sure works in the rest of my online life.
(As a more out there approach to the issue of editors, we might want to think about social forces. Everyone wants to be an author because it's sexy and glamorous. Seriously, how many people do you know who haven't tried writing at some point? Very few want to be an editor, obviously. But people *are* willing to donate their time in other unsexy, unglamorous ways. Maybe what we should be thinking about, if we want to guarantee good editing in the post-IP world, is how we reward editors with social capitol. The fanfic world probably has the right idea, explicitly thanking 'beta readers', making that something of an honor, particularly if the writer is well liked. Reputation economies are how things get done in post-scarcity environments, so maybe we need to start putting some real thought in how to engineer them for optimal results.)
Piracy also hurts people, true. But it sure seems to be inevitable, so maybe we should just be glad it has some good benefits too? I didn't really want to get into this here, but I'm not sure where else to go with that. We obviously can't stop it technologically. We *might* be able to legally if we mandate locked-platform computing, universal DRM, and generally break everything that is good and wonderful about the internet. Which, of course, no one (here) actually wants. But until I see a working alternative, hand-wringing about it seems entirely pointless. Yes, it would be nice if people could get paid for their work. It would be nice if I could make a living blacksmithing, but no one is distorting the legal system to guarantee *that*.
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...I totally missed that PDF had become an open standard.
Publisher didn't support PDF for years because Adobe wanted to charge us $100/box for it.
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(by which I mean my comment was not sarcasm, it was surprise.)
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Or until the publisher decides to take away the book you "bought" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html), or until the publisher's distributor's webserviceprovider's IT-company's DRM server goes offline because someone forgot to pay someone else, or...
Besides, ebooks don't smell like old books. I *like* reading my granddad's old engineering texts. There are funny notes in Danish in the margins.
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I buy stuff from webscription.net where I get a set of HTML files to download and keep. And they generally cost about $6 rather than $10. (More when they're brand-new, but that doesn't bother me.)
I can't imagine paying for any book-on-computer that *isn't* in HTML - I like putting things in my browser so I can adjust and resize to my heart's content. Reading things in PDF is painful. And I certainly don't want to buy something tied to a proprietary device that can be snatched away...
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And for me, and my lifestyle, which at this point isn't big on owning a lot of physical stuff, owning a lot of physical books is a giant pain in the ass. I'm not saying I don't like them, but they're heavy, they take up a lot of space. and I have three pretty decent reader options (my lenovo tablet, my touchbook, and my phone). I don't have a problem with paying for content. I am not generically opposed to any possible form of DRM... I just haven't yet seen one which is appropriately archival. Bah.