May 7th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
More on Kindle Pricing
A publishing industry insider informs me that I’m missing a lot with regard to the cost side of the Kindle equation. In addition to your basic fixed costs (payments to author, payments for copy editing, etc.) I’m told that the post-cleanup conversion process is sufficiently expensive that, at this point, publishers are generally losing money on their Kindle sales. That might look different if they could move larger volumes, and I assume publishers are getting into the Kindle game precisely because they’re anticipating higher sales volumes at some future point. But it means that for something that’s clearly going to be a niche product, like Railton’s book, you need to charge pretty high retail prices.
61 Responses to “More on Kindle Pricing”
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May 7th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Could you or your correspondent elaborate on those costs? Presumably publishers have a clean electronic version of the books they publish the old fashioned way. It can’t be that hard to convert it to Amazon’s format unless they’re being really obtuse. And even if they are, presumably over time as people get used to its quirks they’ll develop more automated means to overcome them.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
An anonymous source without any details as to what the expenses are? Screw that. Maybe if there’s tons of diagrams, but for a book that just has text I don’t see how converting it to the Kindle format would any (for a given value of any) expense.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I love the idea of the kindle but, the cost don’t make sense to me. I have to pay $500 for a reader and then pay ~$15 for a book. The average paperback book cost $5 at the store. What could possible be so time consuming about reformatting that it is 3X more expensive for a digital copy. Are formatting, raw materials and actually printing a book really cheaper than just re-formatting.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
I think I’m going to go ahead and call Shenanigans on this one. Converting from their proprietary format to Kindle format simply cannot be that arduous.
Everybody grab a broom, it’s Shenanigans!
May 7th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Being born with a trust-fund, Matthew thinks it desirable that only other folks with trust-funds should be able to create art works like books.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
I agree with the other commenters. This stinks. If “post-cleanup conversion” is really that expensive, Amazon is doing something wrong.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
“post-cleanup conversion process.”
I guess putting all the digital rights software and putting into Amazon’s super secret format slows up editing? I think they are just trying to recoup R&D costs for the unit.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
One thing I do not understand regarding the Kindle, price and making a few available to universities as a test is need for ‘whispernet.’ I would guess that most universities have a wireless network implemented across buildings, dorms and classes. Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to utilize the wifi network rather than using a version of the cell phone network, which is more expensive. Probably less profit for Amazon, though.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I call bullshit as well. And if “clean up” is so expensive, consider:
A 250 page book contains about 70,000 words. A secretary typing 50 words per minute could just retype the thing from scratch in about 23 hours, and it would be ready for whatever format you wanted. Even if you paid him $20/hour, that’s still less than $500.
Any work that doesn’t have a market 50 readers at $10 a pop probably isn’t going to be able to be anywhere profitable on the supply/demand curve.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Being born with a trust-fund, Matthew thinks it desirable that only other folks with trust-funds should be able to create art works like books.
?
May 7th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
This is ridiculous in at least two ways:
1. Amazon / publishers are the ones insisting on DRM’d formats that add to the cost of conversion and require a far more elaborate server-side apparatus than is the case with, for example, Baen Books. . And Baen, unlike university presses, is a for-profit company!
2. I’ve been reading e-books on a Sony Librie (the predecessor to their Reader) for years. This required books to be converted to their proprietary, locked format, often from PDFs that needed reflowing to fit on the smaller device’s screen. While the hardware companies have shown no interest in supporting this, it’s not very difficult at all, thanks to a fine piece of free software developed by a Caltech physicist.
It’s simply indefensible that academic publishers are so unwilling to release their books as unprotected PDFs or PostScript files or whatever they use internally at reasonable prices. I suspect that if all universities placed their presses under the control of their libraries, policies would change quite a bit.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I’m sure glad Matt’s trust fund is relevent to every possible conversation, otherwise this would just get boring.
Matt: “Hey, you guys noticed the sun? It’s pretty neat.”
Comment: “Typical trust-fund Matt! Sure, from up there in your Harvard Ivory Tower it seems nice, but down here in the real world people are dying of skin cancer so your privileged ass can have a nice view. It’s so typical of you not to realise that.”
May 7th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Post cleanup conversion process? What on Earth is that? Converting a digital file into . . . what? A digital file? You can do a million of those at once with a script. Are they scanning paper and running it through OCR? If so, they should exit the publishing business forthwith since they are clearly too stupid for words. Is Amazon charging a ridiculous amount to license their proprietary format?
Until you explain what that phrase means, I’m calling bullshit on this. There is nothing you can do to a digital file you’ve already created that will add substantially to its cost.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
“?”
Matthew thinks that because the marginal cost of an electronically distributed work of art is zero, it’s correct to price an electronically distributed work of art at zero.
Of course, were that to be the case, only those like Matthew who were born with trust-funds could create works of art.
And I think a world like that would suit Matthew’s purposes just fine, which is why he repeatedly argues for it.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Most of the conversion costs I’ve encountered and heard about have been less than $100 per format. But bear in mind that when you’re doing conversions for something that could only sell a dozen copies at best (since e-book sales are still extremely small) and your profit margin is a few dollars per book, it’s not exactly a lucrative enterprise.
Obviously publishers are looking long term, but I think that’s what Matt’s insider means about losing money on the conversion. It’s not that it costs thousands and thousands of dollars, just that even if it costs $100 that turns a lot of conversions into an unprofitable venture in the short term.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
MY,
You should ask Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden over at Making Light. They’re editors for TOR books and probably know all about it.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Petey, the amount received by the vast majority of authors of academic books is zero. We went through on the thread to the last post. Read it.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
This book costs over $30 on Kindle, while most Kindle books cost $10. And this one just happens to be published by a university press, and such presses are famous for charging unusually high prices for books.
Maybe the primary reasons that this book costs > $30 on Kindle are unrelated to its being published by a university press, but I don’t think that’s the way to bet.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Post cleanup conversion process? What on Earth is that? …Until you explain what that phrase means, I’m calling bullshit on this.
Just curious, have you done mark-up work before? I just spent my whole morning converting a (rather short) file for use in presentation. Converting the raster bitmaps to vector graphics, then compensating for errors and data loss, was a piece of work. Granted, I’m no expert, and I don’t know the vocabulary, but I would say there were two key components:
1] Reflowing the document with correct hyphenation, readable font size, etc (was pretty easy with TeX, but fixing box overflows took a while; if working off a photo-ready PDF I’d have been completely stuck)
2] Converting images to formats that scale nicely, scaling them, and somehow (it’d be nice to have a script that checks for readability and edits the file to, e.g., enlarge fonts disproportionately with images, but since we’re talking PNG images that’d require OCR tech etc)
You can do a million of those at once with a script.
While preserving the font and (absolutely most critically) re-flowing the document, including appropriate hyphenation, and proportionality/readability of images? If you have the script handy, I’ll buy it off you.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I second the call of Shenanigans! If the book was written after about 1985, then it was done in an electronic format. So then the conversion is as simple as creating a piece of software for everything in that format. So if the publisher used, say, Quark 2.0 or Adobe 3.1, then you just need a Quark 2.0 or Adobe 3.1 to Kindle program, and boom, EVERY BOOK in those formats is done. Marginal cost? $0.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Tom, cf. my #19. PDF conversion is trickier than that.
May 7th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
I don’t understand the earlier point about the “marginal cost” of the Kindle edition being close to $0. Apart from the separate issues that have been raised about electronic conversion, etc., you could say the same thing about the marginal cost of each additional printed unit of the cloth-bound edition of the the title. The cost of printing 501 units of a title isn’t much different than printing 500 units.
University press academic titles are generally low-margin, but are usually rather expensive because they typically sell very few units. At least that’s the case for advanced academic monographs and collections of essays like Railton’s book. Most of the cost of production lies in the editorial process that results in a printer-ready or Kindle-ready electronic file, not the physical object – paper or electronic – that the end user actually purchases. Somebody needs to pay all those acquisitions editors, manuscript editors and others who brought this book from idea to polished finished product. (That’s not to mention compensating the author – not usually a large cost for academic titles.) Cambridge UP presumably thinks it is appropriate to distribute those costs among all of the people who buy the book, in whichever format. Why should the academic libraries, and the people who buy hard copies of the book from Amazon or in bookstores, foot the entire bill, while the people buying in electronic Kindle units freeload?
May 7th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
“I’m told that the post-cleanup conversion process is sufficiently expensive that, at this point, publishers are generally losing money on their Kindle sales.”
Oh boo hoo. Tell us another lie.
These people use electronic files, right? They have heard of computers? They are aware that, at the absolute most basic level, you can simply freaking PRINT THE FILE TO PDF?
But honestly. This is an industry that seems determined to reproduce every stupid idea to come out of the music industry, starting with an insistence that the user, god forbid, be allowed as absolutely little control over their electronic content as possible. Why would NOT expect their default stance when talking to the public to be a succession of lies?
May 7th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
So why are books so expensive on Kindle. when they have been telling us for a generation that the reason books were so expensive are the publishing costs (ie paper, printing and physical product and personnel overhead costs.) The front office personnel cannot have been that much more valuable than the back office people actually cranking out the physical product.
I detect a rat, otherwise known as a glaring lie by the publishing industry.
May 7th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Where did I see someone say the Kindle will be the 8-track tape of this generation?
I read books from eReader on my palm smart phone. (I think they also do a format for iPhone?) Books are generally more than a paperback, but less than a hardcover. What I get is a search able format I can read on my computer or my phone- devices I already own. Why would I spend money on a Kindle?
May 7th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
They are aware that, at the absolute most basic level, you can simply freaking PRINT THE FILE TO PDF?
Cf. #19.
May 7th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
I would guess that it’s several expensive lunches, part-year salary for a hanger-on and, of course, the actual work must be done in the most expensive office space one can find. The bytes just wouldn’t look as classy if they weren’t funnelled through a high-rise office in Manhatten.
May 7th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Salient-
I understand the process you describe in #19… But what if a publisher can start with a formatted text file? Rich text format? You know, the format the new books was created in, not a scanned image?
No, the book shouldn’t be free on Kindle, but there should be some way to take advantage of the savings provided by NOT printing the thing on paper, shipping, etc. (If books were free, who’d want to write them?)
May 7th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
You know, the format the new books was created in, not a scanned image?
Except nobody uses .rtf because it doesn’t provide hyphenation flow and has no image support whatsoever.
I agree, it would be nice if Kindle books to be cheaper — I don’t own a Kindle and won’t until I can pick up books for about $4 or less (if that never happens, ah well).
May 7th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Correction: I have no idea if “nobody” uses .rtf, as I don’t work in the business. I should have said, “using .rtf does not make sense because . . .”
May 7th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I sure hope everyone buying a Kindle realizes they’re just storming the beaches to create enough of a market for the PDA/phone companies to start making their little gadgets into e-readers. You folks do realize the Kindle and other e-readers will almost certainly end up being replaced by single device that does everything, right? Since I doubt they’ll bother to make the new stuff compatible with the Kindle, have fun paying for all your e-books again.
Mike
May 7th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
How about we just ditch the whole copy editing process to cut down on costs? I.e., have a book that reads like like it was written on a four track. (The kids will love it.)
May 7th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
In the particular case of Railton, it wouldn’t be surprising if his book contained no images at all — many philosophy books don’t. I think I’ve submitted most of my papers as .doc files (OT: Fuck .docx); I don’t know how hard it would be to Kindle a .doc.
[The one paper that had an image that I had to deal with myself, they needed it in some vector graphics format; my department had to pay the university's graphic designer about $15 to format it.]
May 7th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
With regard to academics and copy-editors. Read this amusing post and thread:
http://philosophersanon.blogspot.com/2009/05/copyeditor-blues.html
May 7th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
I’d only consider buying one of these pointless pieces of crap if two things happened:
1- change the name. Books aren’t kindling, which is used to start a fire. Calling your electronic book the same name as fuel to start a fire is perverse.
2- Amazon is evil. They are the Wal-Mart / Starbucks of books, their business model is to specifically kill local small business.
One last thing, the batteries don’t go dead on my books.
May 7th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
I can only assume that “publishing industry insider” is code for “shortsighted fool”. Matt’s original post centered around a philosophy book written by a specialist for (I assume) a fairly narrow audience. This was not a book written to make money. It was written because a dedicate author had ideas that they wanted to put forth in the form of a polished book. It takes very little vision to imagine how this could be accomplished without a publishing company to investing thousands of dollars in “post-cleanup conversion”.
In my field (computer science) almost all writing is produced using LaTex. In latex, you type your text, along with the occasional command (to insert stuff, divide the text into sections or chapters, insert citations, etc…) and then when you hit compile you get a very nicely laid out pdf. With e-books on the rise, I expect to see a lot more people taking advantage of automated layout tools like LaTex.
For some authors (humanities types mostly), LaTex probably isn’t user friendly enough. Certainly this experience deserves to be improved. Amortized across many books, however, the cost of better book-writing software tools is minute.
In the near future, if not right now, any dedicated specialist should be able to write and distribute an ebook independently at very low cost. If they require assistance with a book layout tool, or making figures, or proofreading, they should be free to hire someone with the necessary expertise. Perhaps some enterprising company could even provide such a service. In an ebook-dominated marketplace, however, there is absolutely no reason authors should have to shoot themselves in the foot by signing over exclusive publishing rights to some not-particularly-helpful publishing company.
May 7th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
I certainly don’t have any evidence to justify my feelings but I get the sense that the pricing of books on the Kindle has more to do with maintaining existing price points than anything else. Like some of the other posters on this thread, this rationale smacks of music industry cluelessness.
I know I’m not speaking for everyone, I might not even be speaking for a sizable group, but it seems to me that if I can buy a digital version of a movie for around $15 and a digital version of an album at $10 (which still seems a little high in relation to a movie in my mind) to play on a portable electronic device that costs less than $400 dollars (and serves as cellphone, email device, minimal web browser, etc) then a $15 e-book using a $500 reader is a hard sell.
I love the idea of an e-reader and always imagined I’d be an early adopter but I just can’t get excited by this yet. Not at these price points, at least.
May 7th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Do people on this and the earlier thread really imagine that a PDF that hasn’t been peer reviewed or copy edited or proofread amounts to about the same thing as a Cambridge University Press book? There’s room for further innovation and efficiency in the scholarly publishing industry, but Jesus. CUP just laid off a bunch of folks. Let’s talk again in a few years when a lot of university presses have dropped out entirely and you’re trying to wade through whatever unpublished sludge you found on the internet.
May 7th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
the kindle format is basically stripped down html – most books are laid out in indesign or quarks native format. these are all quite different. there are conversion quirks some of them universal some of them particular to how the book was originally laid out. anyone whos used indesign or quarks web export tools can tell you how well automation works in this situation. if youre converting a book thats basically going to sell zero copies the conversion price per copy will likely be quite high. im sure once publishers get the hang of designing books for print and digital from the start the process will get more efficient. but for now the whole thing is quite new and cumbersome.
btw i am in the process of designing a book for print and kindle and pdf as we speak. its my job. and thats a little fyi for all you experts upthread freaking abt its on yr computer just put it in a kindle ffs.
May 7th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
When they get the kinks ironed out, I’d love to buy a kindle, so long as it allows me to load the books onto a flashdrive.
I think the pricing of books could easily be an issue of low demand.
(Source: Jerold Jenkins, http://www.JenkinsGroupInc.com)
May 7th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Salient: yes, converting from fixed-dimension format to a reflowable one is not trivial. That’s why I pointed to the website for Calibre, a piece of free software an academic has been developing over the past few years. It’s not perfect, but it’s more than good enough for converting philosophy / political science monographs, and it keeps getting better.
You do realize that all LaTeX files–the standard for hard-science academic publishing–can be converted to other formats and resized with almost no effort, right? And that innovations like markdown mean that, in fact, markup needn’t be such a chore?
The bottom line is this: in academic publishing, the academics’ incentive for writing is independent of profit. So is the academics’ incentive for peer-review. So, when it comes down to it, are (many of) the institutions as a whole that do the publishing–university presses and learned societies are non-profits; they just need enough revenue to keep functioning. What you need is editors and marketing and sales, but keep the university presses in mind: you’re being penny-wise and pound-foolish if you price to reduce the press’ subsidy only to pay it back tenfold in library subscriptions for overpriced monographs.
May 7th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
This is the same sort of bullshit arguments we get from every monopolist — sure they cost a fortune but they deliver such fantastic quality.
You know what, people don’t give a damn about this stuff. It’s the same as snobbish music execs claiming that MP3 doesn’t matter because no-one is going to listen to lossy music that “sounds like bad AM radio”.
In the first place the quality loss is wildly exaggerated (the “bad AM radio”), in the second place, you know what, as long as there are redeeming features, people are OK with minor quality issues.
Jesus, don’t be so damn stupid about this. So your automated tool, on one of fifty pages, creates a widow, or has a line that is badly justified, or has a line that overflows. So freaking what?
May 7th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Do people on this and the earlier thread really imagine that a PDF that hasn’t been peer reviewed or copy edited or proofread amounts to about the same thing as a Cambridge University Press book?
@Cambridge Defender–Yes, it seems apparently they do. I have to say you’ve hitting the nail more squarely on the head than anyone else on this thread so far.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
This argument is far too general. Let’s take the Railton book from the previous thread as an example. It is a collection of Railton’s papers all of which have been previously published. Thus, each of the chapters has already been peer reviewed, copy edited, and proofread by the editors of the respected books and journals where they were originally published.
In fact, I would venture the claim that the kind of peer review, copy editing, and proofreading that is done by academic presses in the humanities and social sciences is much less important than it is for regular publishers. Peer review has been done by academic colleagues, by participants at professional conferences, and, in many cases, by dissertation committees. Also, we can assume that Ph.D.s are capable of writing grammatical sentences and doing their own proofreading. We can usually make that assessment because the filtering process has already occurred through the arduous process of graduate school. Presumably, most academics would have also learned to be professionally embarrassed by letting ungrammatical sentences and misspelled words appear in their manuscripts.
For an established and highly respected scholar like Railton, the arguments of the previous paragraph is even stronger.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Salient, you’re using TeX wrong.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
I call on this one. I see a lot of stuff that’s been scanned into a DJVU file. Some of it looks pretty bad, but >90% of the flash can be gotten rid of simply by using something like CutePDF. Oh, I’m a math guy; I use LaTeX a lot with embedded images from M2, Maple, Mathematica, etc. The stuff I’ve seen available on the internet for free (e.g. Fulton’s “Algebraic Geometry”) is just as high a quality as the book itself.
Since the court seems heavily against you on this one Salient, perhaps you should give some specific examples to prove your point, and then show us why your examples are the more common ones.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
ayo maynard pretty sure theres websites where u can get conspiracy ebooks w/fucked up formatting for free – so no worries man yr all set
May 7th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
I haven’t used LaTex in 15 years. I suppose if I had to pay the publication charges out of my own pocket, I might. Most journals wave the charges if you submit in LaTex or RevTex. Those charges are generally over $100 per page, but that’s for equation and figure intensive work. Then again, I really hated LaTex. I might pay the charges and write shorter papers.
May 8th, 2009 at 12:04 am
For what it’s worth, since someone above suggested I add my professional opinion: I have no idea what Matthew’s “publishing industry insider” is thinking of if they’re claiming that “publishers are generally losing money on their Kindle sales.” Readying books for any kind of digital sale isn’t cost-free, but I’m pretty familiar with what goes into this sort of conversion, and I’m pretty sure most publishers are making money on digital sales, Kindle included, even if it isn’t the hand-over-fist bonanza some writers and agents imagine.
I’m also pretty sure that Matthew Yglesias wasn’t suggesting the Cambridge University Press book in question be given away for free, notwithstanding “Petey”’s assertion to that effect.
My main reservation about the Kindle is that you don’t actually own the books you download from Amazon; Amazon’s odious EULA gives them the right to, in effect, break into your library and erase your books. I like Amazon well enough to be a $79/year “Prime” customer, but not quite enough to make myself vulnerable to that sort of thing.
May 8th, 2009 at 12:07 am
Good God! What do you use instead? Or do you mean that you use something like TexMacs? Math formatting will always be a bear – which is why it is such a good benchmark for these types of discussions – but if even the most convoluted of commutative diagrams or free resolutions can be reliably drawn, I don’t see how these excuses about the incredible difficulty of the ‘post cleanup conversion process’ hold any water.
May 8th, 2009 at 6:55 am
Re comment 44: You do realize “regular” publishers don’t do peer review at all, right? Plus if you ditch the gatekeeper role of university presses, a function in part of the peer review they undertake, you’ve got to overhaul the way tenure is handled, at least in the humanities.
I guess I’m now pretty far off the original topic; sorry. As a UP guy I just wanted to clarify the nature of the work that actually goes into scholarly books. (And yes, a single-authored essay collection is a little different than a monograph, but some of the comments here were getting into broader territory than the specific book that started off this discussion.)
May 8th, 2009 at 9:07 am
I think it’s perfectly legitimate to pass along editorial costs, like a university press’s peer review, to Kindle as well as paper editions. But I don’t accept that there isn’t low cost solution to post-conversion clean-up issues, whether technical or brute force. For one thing, it’s not the sort of problem that is beyond the ken of good systems design people. But even if publishers aren’t willing to invest in an integrated system, keeping a couple people on staff to tinker with a file for a day or two post-conversion is not the sort of thing that makes a $5 item into a $30 item.
May 8th, 2009 at 10:17 am
You do realize that all LaTeX files–the standard for hard-science academic publishing–can be converted to other formats and resized with almost no effort, right?
Yeah, I’ve been using TeX. Try resizing an integral sign arbitrarily large, for example. Not everything scales nicely. Simple stuff can be done without any time or thought; more complicated restructuring does take some work. But I readily concede, it’s nice not to have to worry about hyphenation flow; that’s all automatic.
I still had to hand-code all sorts of means for typesetting, and then made adjustments to the code when resizing. (The \overset, \underset and \stackrel commands have functionality that is far too limited for what I’m doing.)
As for rescaling images from MAPLE, arbitrary magnification isn’t an issue, but making the images arbitrarily small but still readable is. In other words, it’s not easy to take a 10in-by-10in notated graph, scale it down to a one-inch-by-one-inch version for paperback, and ensure that all of the notation is still readable. It’s often actually easier to re-draw the thing in MAPLE and let MAPLE do the rescaling.
Since the court seems heavily against you on this one Salient, perhaps you should give some specific examples to prove your point, and then show us why your examples are the more common ones.
I don’t respond to individuals who have previously demonstrated overt hostility to me — and who continue to do so — and don’t intend to here. I’ll be ignoring all further comments from this user.
May 8th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Also, specifically regarding the topic at hand: y’all should specify that you all are talking about Kindle DX, which I don’t believe has been released yet. It’s common knowledge that Kindle doesn’t have a native PDF reader, so all this talk of “print to PDF” doesn’t apply to the Kindle. It’s the PDF –> WhateverKindle’sMLIs stage that’s apparently problematic.
May 8th, 2009 at 11:06 am
plz do not hassle the revolutionaries w/technical details
May 8th, 2009 at 11:28 am
?!?!?!
I have no idea who you are or who you think I am.
It does strike me however, that refusing to defend your original vague comments with specific examples of this ‘post-cleanup conversion process’ that’s supposedly so expensive because someone has been mean to you in the past(rereading my post, I certainly don’t see any overt hostility there) isn’t very, er, persuasive.
And no, I don’t think anyone has changed their mind on this one. Btw, there was an interesting discussion on NPR last week or thereabouts wherein the person being interviewed opined that the Kindle was waaaaay overpriced. In fact, given that it’s basically a subscription service, the reader itself should be either given away or sold for next to nothing. Given the nature of DRM, I’d have to agree.
May 8th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Frankly, my view is the exact opposite. I have almost no inclination to buy movies; why buy something I’m likely to watch two or three times at most? Albums, on the other hand, are worth the investment, because repeated listenings are an intrinsic part of music these days.
Anyway, I can find a large percentage of DVDs at local public libraries here in Connecticut.
May 8th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
I have no idea who you are or who you think I am.
Hmm, okay. I thought you were the same ScentofViolets that lambasted me on Crooked Timber for about two days running on one of Harry’s education threads, which got rather one-directionally hostile against me (to the point where I was contacted privately about it). I’ll give benefit of the doubt that two folks go by ScentofViolets on the Internet; surely 2+ people go by Salient, etc. (And if you do happen to be that same ScentofViolets, I’d of course appreciate a brief apology for the earlier obtuseness.)
Anyhow. I don’t know what Yglesias’ friend’s phrase “post-cleanup conversion process” is referencing exactly — I wasn’t the one who originally used that phrase, of course — but I’m guessing it implies the Kindle proprietary format is as much a pathetic mess as, say, hyper-text markup. Someone upthread (who probably knows more than I do) said Kindle is basically an HTML analogue. If that’s true, the work involved in type-setting would be horrendous. But I don’t know.
As for the pricing of Kindle, I guess I agree. I don’t really have an opinion on it, other than I definitely wouldn’t buy a Kindle at the current prices. And I’m all for cheaper books. I could probably even be talked into some kind of subsidy for publishers of academic books if it drove down costs.
What I do know is that (1) even vector graphics are hard to rescale when they are notation-heavy, and (2) PDF-to-PDF conversion is generally hard because you have to get hyphenation flow right. (While TeX does this part automatically for me, I doubt your average humanities writer uses TeX).
Overall, the only point I’m trying to be “persuasive” about is that converting a document to Kindle can’t possibly be as easy as “print to PDF” — and as for people who say it must be that easy, I’m guessing they probably don’t work in professional publishing.
I suppose what we’d really need to do, to settle the matter, is contact a professional publisher and chat with ‘em.
May 8th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
By the way, I tentatively agree with #6. If the Kindle format truly is anything like HTML, Amazon is indeed doing something wrong.
May 8th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Actually, I wonder how much of the $9.99 goes directly into Amazon’s coffers? Maybe they have a high markup, maybe the publisher only gets $2.
May 9th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
I sure hope everyone buying a Kindle realizes they’re just storming the beaches to create enough of a market for the PDA/phone companies to start making their little gadgets into e-readers. You folks do realize the Kindle and other e-readers will almost certainly end up being replaced by single device that does everything, right? Since I doubt they’ll bother to make the new stuff compatible with the Kindle, have fun paying for all your e-books again.
I’ve got both a Kindle and an iphone, and I simply wouldn’t ever want to try and read a whole book (or several books) on the iphone. The text is too small and the battery life is too short.
I suspect that eReaders will always be niche devices for people who read a lot of books, but for those people (like myself), I doubt that they’ll be supplanted by an all-in-one device.