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 Post subject: Re: ATK Kitchen Equipment Buying Guide 2012
PostPosted: Mon Dec 24, 2012 2:40 pm 
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I agree with Josh 100%. The cost of advertising and marketing remain the same. It is also harder to buy an ebook on impulse because the cover looks pretty. My daughter loaned me her digital copy of Flour.

While some of the original e publications were awful, the new ones are great. For CI for example, there are more nice images, links to other pertinent articles, links to taste tests and videos, etc. As I said, really impressive. I highly recommend it.

BTW, the link on the CI website for the current issue is were it has been for years, on the left under Browse All Issues, the current one appearing first.

I just treated myself to Cuisine at Home's digital archive, every issue ever published. I love having an index and all the issues on hand and I can have it both on my computer and iPad.

So far I've not encountered "device" issues. Kindle and Nook work fine on the iPad. C@H digital is only published by Nook. I bought one issue to try and found I could read it via Adobe Digital bypassing the Nook and put it in iTunes as a PDF. Not going to subscribe for now.

I have always been a sucker for the discounted books aisle, specially for cookbooks, love it that Amazon regularly offers some ebooks or $1.99 to $3.99 (e.g. got a Pepin book for $2.99) DH is very happy since I have stopped taking over the house with magazines and cookbooks, lol.

And best of all it does provide instant gratification. Which for books such as those by E. L. James is great. :D

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Last edited by Cubangirl on Mon Dec 24, 2012 8:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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 Post subject: Re: ATK Kitchen Equipment Buying Guide 2012
PostPosted: Mon Dec 24, 2012 2:53 pm 
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TheFuzzy wrote:
Paul Kierstead wrote:
Those are the numbers trotted out every time, but they are BS as a basis of comparison of expected costs of an ebook and a 'real' book.


Paul, my wife works in publishing; HarperCollins for 8 years, freelance for 3. I think she knows just a little bit more about the economics of book publication than you do.


A variation of the authority argument; used by every failed industry ever. That is basically the only proves she is intimately familiar with the economics of how it has been traditionally been done, not how it could be done. In fact, one could argue that she is likely blinded by her current knowledge, at least partially.

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eBooks can be sold that way, but the fact is that they aren't. Amazon, B&N.com, and iTunes account for more than 90% of eBook sales, and as retailers they charge as much margin as any brick-and-mortar retailer ever did. In fact, Amazon's commission on the sales of eBooks is higher than discount physical retailers.


Wait, is this the same amazon that publishers were complaining were selling e-books at a loss? The same amazon that was paying the hard-cover wholesale price to the publisher, but selling below wholesale on the kindle? That amazon? Also, I am pretty sure the *are* the #1 discount physical retailer (just not brick and mortar). Amazon traditionally paid the wholesale book price when publishing on the kindle. The publishers forced the agency model. They want e-books to be more expensive, because widespread e-books will undermine their business model. They also seen an opportunity to shore up eroding margins (cause, in part no doubt, by Amazon)

Amazon, B&N and iTunes sell 90% of eBooks because publishers can't run an e-commerce website and insist on DRM (which is a tool Amazon and Apple use to control the publishers as much as the user, if not more)

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Nobody's done an across-the-board economic comparison, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out that the technological infrastructure required for mass online ebook sales was more expensive than the trucks and warehouses required for paper sales.


Seriously? You figure email is more expensive then postage too? Come now. Sure for a few thousand, or maybe the first million, but it scales waaaay better. Large captial cost, extremely small incremental cost.

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That alone should significantly reduce the consumers cost of the book. Who cares what it cost to make, what it is being sold for that matters.


If publishers cannot make more revenue than it cost them to produce a book, they raise prices or stop publication. Book publishing is not, in general, a charitable activity.


You were quoting the price of making a book, and then extrapolating that to mean the book should not be cheaper. However, the cost to make a book is not the only factor in its final sale. I was pointing out the argument concerns the purchase cost, not the production cost.

Quote:
Also, ebooks suffer from a much higher percentage of illegal copying than paper books.


If the pirating results in a lost sale, then it is irrelevant to ebook vrs physical book. Lost revenue is lost revenue.

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have no residuals to get rid off, no over-production, etc.


And that's not true at all. Again, you're working under the misconception that the cost of paper is a majority cost in book production. It's not.


So e-books do have over production or residual costs? I don't have misconceptions about paper cost. There are many factors in a books cost; they all add to it. We don't have to only discuss the one single cost which is the majority of its cost. Ignoring all these costs is misleading. Many books are complete flops; a physical book loses more money in the flop then an e-book. That makes differences in risk, etc. You can't limit the discussion the books which are actually sold, as risk and failure are very much part of the cost of the business. Even a small run of books has a fair bit of minimum cost. Because of that minimum cost, you will invest more in placement, advertising, etc. to try to mitigate the risk. When a book can be published (not marketed, etc. just put out there for purchase) for very minimal cost, the approach to risk etc. may be different; it certainly has in other industries. You might, for example, be willing to spend a little less on other activities because the basic risk level is decreased. The whole thing will need to be re-thought. Music is slowly coming to terms (or not) with this; the full change isn't here yet, be we can see plenty of signs of it.

Quote:
You're laboring under the same set of misconceptions which a large number of readers are, and which is a major inhibitory factor in the development of an ebook market. Intuitively, it makes sense that something as substantial as 2lbs of paper and cardboard would be the major cost center for book production. It just happens not to be true.


Actually, you seem to be projecting the misconceptions of a lot of readers on to me. I am making no such argument; I am arguing that it is (or will be) a fundamental shift in how the business operates. The fact the publishers insist on the old models will ultimately damn them if they don't start to think different. I see Tor has finally lifted DRM so that they can easily sell direct without having someone like iTunes or Amazon wedge themselves in between. They seem to be having the reality dawn on them.

I also argue that an ebook should not be more expensive then a hardcover, which it frequently is, and not more expensive then a softcover is, which it very very frequently is. In these cases I buy neither (nor do I pirate, there is a whole massive world of other things to read, so why bother).


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 Post subject: Re: ATK Kitchen Equipment Buying Guide 2012
PostPosted: Mon Dec 24, 2012 2:56 pm 
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Cubangirl wrote:
It is also harder to buy an ebook on impulse because the cover looks pretty. My daughter loaned me her digital copy of Flour.


Do you have any idea how many eBooks I've bought with that damn 1-click buy on amazon? Or how many times I've bought the sequel to something when I hit the end of the book on my kindle and it offered me the opportunity to buy the sequel?

eBooks are pretty much the ultimate in impulse buys, you can do it in under a second...


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 Post subject: Re: ATK Kitchen Equipment Buying Guide 2012
PostPosted: Mon Dec 24, 2012 4:22 pm 
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Paul Kierstead wrote:
A variation of the authority argument; used by every failed industry ever. That is basically the only proves she is intimately familiar with the economics of how it has been traditionally been done, not how it could be done. In fact, one could argue that she is likely blinded by her current knowledge, at least partially.


If I have to weigh two opinions, I'm going to take the argument of someone with 11 years of experience in the field over the opinion of someone who is, as far as I know, just sourcing stuff from blogs. If you have source materials which present an alternative production economy for ebooks (with numbers), please link.

Quote:
Wait, is this the same amazon that publishers were complaining were selling e-books at a loss? The same amazon that was paying the hard-cover wholesale price to the publisher, but selling below wholesale on the kindle? That amazon?


Yes. Amazon achieved their discounts by forcing lower prices on publishers. Amazon did not decrease their own margin at all.

Quote:
Also, I am pretty sure the *are* the #1 discount physical retailer (just not brick and mortar). Amazon traditionally paid the wholesale book price when publishing on the kindle. The publishers forced the agency model. They want e-books to be more expensive, because widespread e-books will undermine their business model. They also seen an opportunity to shore up eroding margins (cause, in part no doubt, by Amazon)


I agree that the agency model is, in the long run, a bad idea, and exhibitory of the kind of backwards thinking which has the publishing industry, as a whole, in serious trouble. Books are merchandise, and should be sold for a fixed wholesale cost and left up to the retailer on how to price them (I feel the same way about music, movies and software). On the other hand, the publisher/Apple agreements did succeed in breaking Amazon's monopolist position on ebooks, which they attempted to use to force a pricing model which was profitable for them and not for the publishers. That is, while the publishers shouldn't be able to tell retailers how to price their sales, retailers shouldn't be able to dictate wholesale prices to the publishers.

However, anyone who seriously believes in an organized conspiracy of publishers doesn't have much experience with them. We're talking about a group who can't agree on anything even within their own staff.

Quote:
Amazon, B&N and iTunes sell 90% of eBooks because publishers can't run an e-commerce website and insist on DRM (which is a tool Amazon and Apple use to control the publishers as much as the user, if not more)


And any publisher who did run their own retail website would increase their costs enough that their books would be priced similarly to what they are now. For that matter, there's no beating the network distribution advantages of Amazon and iTunes.

Quote:
Seriously? You figure email is more expensive then postage too? Come now. Sure for a few thousand, or maybe the first million, but it scales waaaay better. Large captial cost, extremely small incremental cost.


You're forgetting the labor cost. Computer staff get paid way more than truck drivers. I should know ;-)

Quote:
You were quoting the price of making a book, and then extrapolating that to mean the book should not be cheaper. However, the cost to make a book is not the only factor in its final sale. I was pointing out the argument concerns the purchase cost, not the production cost.


Average revenue from each sale must exceed average production cost, or there is no profit and production ceases. You can't unlink the price of a book from the cost to make the book.

Quote:
If the pirating results in a lost sale, then it is irrelevant to ebook vrs physical book. Lost revenue is lost revenue.


Illegal copying percentages are higher for eBooks than they are for paper books because it's easier. This has to be taken into account when budgeting production of a book.

Quote:
So e-books do have over production or residual costs?


Correct. Marketing costs, rights costs, and artist payments are all scaled based on the expected book sales. If these are overbudgeted, this increases the losses per book. If they are underbudgeted, then the publisher has to go back to rights holders and negotiate an increase, often a higher rates than the original rights (since the rights holders now know there's money in it), and artist payments automatically increase with increased sales.

You could argue that this is largely because publisher's agreements are still structured around paper book ideas and a stupid focus on release-week accounting, and you'd probably be right. But it takes a lot of time for the legal conventions around an entire industry to change. If you really want to see hidebound legal insanity, check out the movie industry.

It's also hard for publishers to focus on a new model when paper books still account for 75 to 80% of book sales.

Quote:
You might, for example, be willing to spend a little less on other activities because the basic risk level is decreased. The whole thing will need to be re-thought. Music is slowly coming to terms (or not) with this; the full change isn't here yet, be we can see plenty of signs of it.


Certainly, but the only risk you've decreased through ebooks is the risk of wasted paper copies, which is only 15-20% of total production cost. So you've only decreased your risk by 20%. That's nice, but it's hardly a qualitative change.

Quote:
Actually, you seem to be projecting the misconceptions of a lot of readers on to me. I am making no such argument; I am arguing that it is (or will be) a fundamental shift in how the business operates. The fact the publishers insist on the old models will ultimately damn them if they don't start to think different.


Too late; the publishing industry is already hemmoraging money and are headed downwards at maximum handbasket speed. We wouldn't be seeing as much activity as we do around eBooks, self-publishing, POD, etc., if the industry wasn't in a state of collapse. I agree with you that we will eventually end up with a new model. However, before we have a successful new model, we will get a lot of failed ones.

Quote:
I see Tor has finally lifted DRM so that they can easily sell direct without having someone like iTunes or Amazon wedge themselves in between. They seem to be having the reality dawn on them.


Actually, the publishers of Tor have been campaigning for DRM-free since they introduced eBooks. It's taken years to get MacMillan (the parent company) lawyers to agree. Yes, this is the same MacMillan which is the holdout still fighting the price-fixing case with the FTC.

Quote:
I also argue that an ebook should not be more expensive then a hardcover, which it frequently is, and not more expensive then a softcover is, which it very very frequently is. In these cases I buy neither (nor do I pirate, there is a whole massive world of other things to read, so why bother).


Oh, I agree that the pricing on eBooks is screwed up. It's just that the reasons for pricing being screwed up are more complex than the reasons you present, and much harder to fix. And simply not buying the book is the right answer (just as I simply won't shop at Whole Foods. ;-) )

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 Post subject: Re: ATK Kitchen Equipment Buying Guide 2012
PostPosted: Mon Dec 24, 2012 7:22 pm 
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My only beef with ebook cookbooks is that you cannot print from them. I'd like to print out whatever recipe I'm cooking, either to cook from the print out, or to be able to give it to a friend. With a hard copy book, I'd just photocopy the page I am using...so for that inconvenience alone I won't buy ebook formatted cookbooks. OTOH, I love, love, love kindle, iBooks, kobo (whoever is selling cheapest) for novels, and I love getting the magazines in digital form (they don't pile up around the house). I'd love if the magazines would print too, but because I also have web membership for CI, CC and FC, I just do it from there.

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 Post subject: Re: ATK Kitchen Equipment Buying Guide 2012
PostPosted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 6:22 am 
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TheFuzzy wrote:
If I have to weigh two opinions, I'm going to take the argument of someone with 11 years of experience in the field over the opinion of someone who is, as far as I know, just sourcing stuff from blogs. If you have source materials which present an alternative production economy for ebooks (with numbers), please link.


Authority argument and Ad hominem. For the record, I'm not much of a blog reader. Nor am I presenting -- or think I have the answer for -- an alternative. But even if I was reading blogs, it is a fallacy to dismiss an argument out of hand due to its source, and attacking the credibility of the arguer is just a dodge on the level of politics.

Quote:
Yes. Amazon achieved their discounts by forcing lower prices on publishers. Amazon did not decrease their own margin at all.


Pretty much every article ever written on the business model of the Kindle says that Amazon lost money on a great deal of Kindle books, especially those available in hardcover only. They paid wholesale and sold the kindle edition below it. Now I am well aware that was to capture market, but they still took the hit, so they did decrease their margin. Of course, they have also spent years hammering the publishers for lower prices, and that is outside the kindle (though certainly the kindle isnt going to improve it).

Quote:
Illegal copying percentages are higher for eBooks than they are for paper books because it's easier. This has to be taken into account when budgeting production of a book.


There will be quite a bit of illegal copying even if the publisher does not produce an ebook. This is potentially lost revenue for the physical books. The copying happens irrespective of the publishers choosing to make it legally available electronically.

Quote:
You could argue that this is largely because publisher's agreements are still structured around paper book ideas and a stupid focus on release-week accounting, and you'd probably be right. But it takes a lot of time for the legal conventions around an entire industry to change. If you really want to see hidebound legal insanity, check out the movie industry.


Yes, I would argue that.

Quote:

It's just that the reasons for pricing being screwed up are more complex than the reasons you present, and much harder to fix. And simply not buying the book is the right answer (just as I simply won't shop at Whole Foods. ;-) )
[/quote]

Actually, you argued with someone else, because I was arguing that the business model was very broken, and I didn't offer a fix at all, simple easy complex or hard. I argue that their numbers are BS because they are based on a broken business model, and aren't applicable. I also argue that their numbers are misleading because they are based on a broken business model, and that the numbers don't account for different opportunities or risks. I've never argued it was simple, or that the books should be sold super cheap, etc. And while I recognize that publishers are still in the business of selling physical books, I think that the change to eBooks for fiction and some forms of non-fiction (ex. biographies and similar non-reference material) is going to be very very rapid; adoption rates of e-readers is quite stunning.

And, wherever I see the "This price was set by the publisher" I can give you 99% odds that publisher just lost a sale with me, because they are trying to gouge me for an eBook that is 50% or more above the price of the softcover. They win in one sense: I didn't buy the eBook.

I think a lot of them probably won't survive, which is unfortunate because the diversity is good for the readers.


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 Post subject: Re: ATK Kitchen Equipment Buying Guide 2012
PostPosted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 6:43 am 
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About CI in the digital version-I get in on my iPad, and can only see the current issue. Is there a way to see the older issues I purchased with my subscription?


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 Post subject: Re: ATK Kitchen Equipment Buying Guide 2012
PostPosted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 7:06 am 
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Heckers, did not mean to start any serious dispute here. My primary arguement with paper versus ebook is the the cost of the paper and the actual distribution of all those books. Now, I don't know how much that costs, but I've had friends that worked as printers. They pretty much refused to work for free, particularly if you wanted quality work on an on-going basis. Paper may be cheap, trucks and truckers are not.

I cannot dispute Fuzzy's wife's expertise, she has much more real time in that world. But common sense tells me that bean counters are paid to maximize their share of the pie. And that while marketing still costs, a click or two online is not as expensive as a gum chewing clerk that may or may not be well versed about where to find what you want in the stacks.

If actually printing and delivering a paper format book is 20 percent of the books price, I figure that is pretty close to why I quit going to movies when they hit $8 plus (awhile back) so I could pay for the assistant to the assistant directors new Benzer or Aston or whatever was in vogue those days. And that was just "part of the costs of making movies".

Sure, I miss the sense of "shared experience" that you get in a filled theater and rarely in a living room or rec room even with a big flat screen. But movies managed to price their product out of the market. And as far as I am concerned, for the most part eBooks, for whatever reason, are doing the same.

Also, as handy as they are, I just broke my Kindle for the second time. They are nice, but sturdy would not be in my description of them.

Merry Christmas, may peace and good will be in each every heart this day.

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 Post subject: Re: ATK Kitchen Equipment Buying Guide 2012
PostPosted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 9:56 am 
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Becky, you should be able to see all the digital editions that you have purchased. You won't be able to see the ones you had on paper. Are you saying you can see your previous digital editions of Ci? I just started CI, so I don't have any old ones, but for F&W, and BA I can see all the previous issues.

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 Post subject: Re: ATK Kitchen Equipment Buying Guide 2012
PostPosted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 11:21 am 
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I have to chime in on ebooks. I used to work in publishing until a ton of us were axed due to outsourcing. Amazon outsources their ebooks to India. They use the same company that my former company now uses. Just the production editors alone went from 80 Americans down to 11!!!! The art department was completely moved to India along with copyediting.

Ebooks are sooo cheap to produce!!! They are produced with cheap labor in India!!! (aptara and cadmus are the major companies in America that facilitate all this)

These were all well paying jobs and are not coming back. (I am now being retrained on the government's dime for lpn and hoping to do the one year bridge to RN after I get one year's experience as lpn, as required.)

Merry Christmas!


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