Agreed; that also doesn’t take into account that the physical cost of things like eBooks and digital music is far less than printing paper books and pressing albums or cds.
Except my argument is that the durability doesn’t actually provide anything of great extra value. It is instead a gimmick being used by the fact that publishers don’t particularly approve of libraries, booklending, or even book reselling in the first place. And that to the extent that it gets priced into the model it will eventually get priced right back out because the economic value argument is based on, essentially and appropriately for library books, a fiction.
And I’m certainly not arguing that the laws of economics are being overturned. I’m completely fine with the publishers trying and getting their way. I just think they’ll eventually find themselves the losers as they defend an economic model that, with the invention of the internet, will just push people to distribution channels that simply cut them out of the way as more of a hindrance than a value adder.
I have absolutely no idea how that got to be there. Not only was that not for this thread, it wasn’t even for this message board.
I think people overestimate the physical costs of printing a book. They’re real, obviously, but as a percentage of the total they’re probably less than most people think.
Take a standard hardcover with a list price of $30.
Publishers are wholesalers, not retailers. Small bookstores buy the books for a 40% discount, large dealers for a 50% discount, and super-large ones like Amazon or Wal-mart often get 55% discounts.
Say that the publisher gets $15 per book. That’s income. That $15 is split into five major categories.
- Author royalties
- Office overhead (editors, publicists, art directors, the rights department, lawyers, executives, secretaries, janitors, all building costs including capital outlays)
- Physical costs of printing (including distribution and warehousing)
- Taxes
- Profit
The arcana of accounting makes publisher numbers as unreliable as movie studio numbers. I can’t give specifics for those categories and certainly the numbers change wildly for bestsellers as opposed to ordinary books. As I keep arguing, though, 95%+ of the books published are not bestsellers and those are the ones we need to be concerned with.
Once you look at the numbers this way, it’s clear that Physical costs of printing is not a large percentage of the total. If I put it at $3 per book I couldn’t be far off. So that’s the maximum amount of savings that electronic publication gives you. It’s actually less than that because designing a book to look good on an electronic reader has yet to be fully automated. Humans are involved and humans are costly. Footnotes, graphics, and the other non-text materials that most non-fiction has (along with some fiction these days) need lots of massaging to work, especially across platforms.
This offset is again offset by the lack of need to provide different physical formats (hardback, trade paperback, and mass market paperback). And it means that unsold books don’t have to be returned for full credit as is the practice today. Again, I can’t tell you how all the offsets net out but I’m pretty sure that $3 per book is the ballpark number for maximum possible differential. Therefore if a book that would have sold for $30 is sold electronically for less than $24, somebody’s losing money on the deal. The savings for trade paperbacks are probably less, because the trade paperback uses the same plates as a hardcover and often the same cover art and design so that much of the costs are amortized over a larger print run.
The book business is not the same as the music business. Using the latter as a guide will lead you astray.
It has less value in other respects. I think the overall differences in format equal out in terms of value. But even if it has more value, the right thing to do is charge more for it, not make it self destruct.
If they want to charge more for or limit concurrent loans of the same file that’s fine, because that’s a copy, and managing copies is what copyright is for. But once the library purchases a copy it should be able to do anything with it other than make more copies of it.
And a librarian might correct me, but I seriously doubt there are a large number of books being replaced due to handling or damage. I don’t think that particular advantage ends up being a relevant factor.
And I have some serious ethical qualms about planned obsolescence that isn’t related to materials cost.
Librarian again…
You’re right, a large number of books aren’t being replaced when they’re damaged. But that’s because we don’t have the money to replace them. Books are frequently damaged and unable to be circed anymore. I couldn’t put a number on it, but it’s not a rare occurrence.
Which brings up the idea of - if the indestructibleness of ebooks is a real selling point, will the seller replace files that are electronically damaged before their share limit is reached?
Yes, but the 26 number wasn’t based on that being an average number of times a book can be lent before it stops being popular or highly circulated, but that being the number of times a book can be lent before it has to come out of circulation because it’s falling apart. The video linked in the OP showed the fallacy in that argument.
I wonder if we’ll see the publishers themselves try to get into the book-lending business.
Again, the video shows jack squat. It shows five books that have survived way more than 26 circulations. There’s no guarantee any book will survive to 26. Some fall apart after ten circulations.
26 circulations is probably too low for an average destruction point, but like I said, as far as popularity goes, it’s a pretty good number to use as an average.
Some will fall apart after 5, if they were in the hands of 5 people who mistreat books. Some will survive for 100 circulations if they’re in the hands of people who don’t. It’s the publishers’ contention, though, that after 26 circulations, no book is in fit shape for circulation and that’s the reason why they’re capping ebooks at 26 circulations too. They’re the ones making the specious claim, not the librarians.
But popularity has nothing to do with the policy.
I feel that 26 is too low. 50 loans would be more reasonable.
Just to argue the other side…
The library’s cost should be significantly less with Ebooks. There’s no shelf restocking. No one is needed to check the book out. Everything is done through the web software.
That doesn’t mean the publishers should swoop in like pirates. But, the libraries could afford to pay a little more.
I keep seeing variations of this claim in commentaries on the issue, so I tried to track down where it came from.
I haven’t had any luck. Some people ascribe it to Josh Marshall, the HarperCollins president of sales. But here’s the open letter he sent out about the policy.
“Provide a year of availability for titles with the highest demand, and much longer for other titles and core backlist” isn’t the same as “no fit shape for circulation” or the similar statements I’ve read.
Is there another statement being referred to? Because there aren’t any spurious claims in this, whether you agree or disagree with the policy.
Tangential perhaps to the library discussion, but what pupose does a traditional retailer serve for ebooks? (Online I can understand… but it’s not like I can wander into my local bookstore and browse the e-novels on their shelves).
And an online retailer of e-books won’t have nearly the same overheads as a brick & mortar store – or even that of an online retailer of print books that require storage, picking, packing, and shipping.
It seems (to me) very probable that a $30 hardback could be sold electronically for substantially less than $24 and for all of the somebodies to actually be making more profit.
What you may or may not realize is that through e-book lending databases used by libraries like Overdrive there are, in fact, digital “copies”. And I dare you to try to explain this to patrons. Yes, the book is ones and zeros. Yes, there is no reason on earth why you should have to wait in line for a copy like you do for the print version. Please send a letter to the publisher because that is clearly stupid bullshit.
I’m a university librarian so I deal mostly with academic books rather than mass-market books, but I have never seen an eBook offered to libraries for less than the cost of a hardcover. Looking at some of my most recent slips just now, it looks like eBooks typically cost 20% more than the same title in hardcover. That’s for a single user license; eBooks with multi-user licenses typically cost twice as much as a hardcovers and sometimes four times as much. FWIW none of these eBooks can presently be downloaded to a device, they all have to be read while online.
I actually asked about this at a recent meeting at work, and our head of Cataloging & Acquisitions said that eBooks actually cost a lot more than print books in terms of her staff’s time because they have to regularly check up on the records for eBooks and make sure that we still have access to the books and that the links are all up to date. She said she couldn’t say which format is cheaper in the long run.
A little more than the cost of a hardcover, or a little more than the 20% more than the cost of a hardcover that we’re already paying?
ETA: Regarding circulation numbers, it is also my experience that few books ever circulate 26+ times.
That’s a good piece of data because I think most people get their ideas about e-book pricing from what Amazon charges for bestsellers, which is loss leader pricing. The real world obviously operates differently.
And people wonder why I think/have thought e-books are a boon to publishers and terrible for readers. 
A library should be allowed loan out anything they have as many times as they want. Just as I should be able to. However, if they contract for a preferable purchase price for an item they will lend, then they should abide by the terms of their contract (and I assume in this case it’s being electronically abiding for them in case they forget).
Ok. You can close the thread now.
Da fuck? Welp, I’ma write a letter to my local library not to waste their time with e-books if I can’t even put it on my nook.