Madison is both intriguing and infuriating. She's a fluent and enthusiastic writer and video blogger - and a raging self-publicist much like myself.
Unfortunately, her website isn't very intuitive, you can't leave comments on her blog (an unforgivable blogging sin) and she insists on doing those stupid finger-wiggling 'speech marks' whenever she says the name of her blog.
But she's also really cute and has a tattoo. As I said, both intriguing and infuriating.
Her most recent post is about the new Amazon Kindle.How Main Street Publishers are Ripping off Kindle Owners
If you haven't heard of the Kindle, let me give you the skinny. Basically, it's like an iPod for books. Except it's about a hundred bucks more expensive.
Roughly the size of a paperback, Kindle has a screen which displays 'eBooks.'
Those are digital copies of books. You can turn the page, scan the text or even get Kindle's creepy electronic voice to 'read' the stories to you.
As a gadget, it's pretty cool. With wireless connectivity, you can browse and download new books instantly, get updates of the latest paper and even store thousands of books for reading later.
It's also completely pointless. Most of us prefer a real book or newspaper anyway and - as girl Arsonist points out - the price of an eBook is often the same as buying a paper copy of that novel.
She wrote to "St. Martin's, Penguin, HarperEbooks, Random House, Simon & Schuster and all the other Main Street Publishers" and argued: "We don't take kindly to the fact you are trying to take advantage of readers (and authors) by overcharging us because you are unable to run your business in a profitable manner."
Steady on there, girl!
I'm not sure how a smart cookie like Girl Arsonist was unaware of this, but the reason books are so damned expensive is not merely because of the paper they're printed on. It's because of the enormous costs of buying, editing and marketing books.
When published in sufficient quantities, the price of printing a book is only a few dollars. I know this for a fact, as I've printed copies of my own books.
When you factor in Kindle sales, you've got to think that:
- You still have to pay the author, editor and marketing team the same as for a 'real' book.
- Everybody who buys a digital copy of the book WILL NOT buy a paper copy.
"We know that eBooks cost pennies to make." Girl Arsonist claims.
Well, you're wrong. They don't. For the most part, they cost as much as making 'real' books.
They are real books. They're just intangible and digital.
That doesn't make them any less entertaining to read, or less compelling, or less sexy or frightening. It doesn't mean the writer spent less time writing them, or that the editor didn't pour over every syllable with the same attention to detail. It doesn't mean that they spent less time marketing the books, or sending the author on cross-country promotional tours.
They did everything they had to do with the 'real' book except print in on paper.
So, when you complain that eBooks are only 'a few dollars less than the actual print book,' perhaps it's worth considering that those few dollars are probably the cost of printing the book.
What more do you want, Girl Arsonist?
Well, now my rant's over, I do recommend you go over and check out her website. Her video blogs are hilarious. I especially liked this one (as I'm really feeling this at the moment, having got a rejection slip for Bootleg Boys just yesterday.)
5 comments:
I'll note that in a lot of cases, ebooks are much cheaper than dead tree books.
An RPG book I bought two days ago was 26 bucks as a paper book, and 8 as an ebook. Baen has 1635: The Dreeson Incident for 6 as an ebook, it sells for 20 at amazon, and 26 is the list price.
It's been my experience that ebooks are substantially cheaper, and have a few other benefits: You can vary the font size, you can get the books basically instantly, and you no longer have huge piles of books on every flat surface in your house.
'dead tree book' - I love it!
Oh, my God, 1635 looks AMAZING. I just looked it up. I have to get myself a copy!
I was reading the Harry turtledove alternate history of the Civil War. Those were a riot.
You'll want to start with 1632. You can read it for free at: http://www.webscription.net/p-379-1632.aspx
I had the same debate with my husband before he bought his Sony reader. I was arguing that the e-books should be much cheaper. If you say that the production cost of the dead tree book is so small, as you say, then yeah, you're right, the electronic ones will have a similar price. But you get many other benefits like living trees and no clutter. For paper fetishists though, it's not much of an appeal. I guess, in the end, you could say it is a choice of values, not of value.
In general, paper production is tree-neutral, as the trees used to make paper are grown on tree farms. They harvest the trees, and plant new ones.
The US gained 4 million hectares of forest in the 1990s.
There are many reasons to choose between ebooks and book-books... but loss of forest really shouldn't matter.
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