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

[solarbird]

You fix the problem of formats and corruption by releasing books in an open, reliable standard like PDF
...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.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Formerly a proprietary format, PDF was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format)

[solarbird]

Yes, I know - I looked it up when I saw your comment (the one to which I'd replied), and was like "holy crap, I totally missed that! They finally gave in!"

(by which I mean my comment was not sarcasm, it was surprise.)

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I realized that after I had replied. As always, this subject has me on edge.

[solarbird]

That's okay, I was unclear myself.