Cookaholics Bulletin Board

That's an excellent analogy. E-mail has mostly replaced paper mail at this point, but not completely. And the replacement took 20 years after 1/3 of Americans got email. So considering we're just reaching the point of 1/4 of Americans getting tablets, we have 20 years to go. Well, probably a bit less since the conventional publishing world is such a disaster.



See, this is one of the fundamentals of the eBook economy which most people don't understand and will delay the rise of eBooks. Except for very fancy photo books, printing is less that 15% of the cost of a paper book. People somehow think it's much more, so they think eBooks should be much cheaper than paper books. 85-90% of the cost of a book is author, agent, editors, packagers, designers, marketing and publisher profit. None of that goes away with an eBook.

Plus, these days with eBooks you need to output them in multiple formats, which means forking out for expensive proprietary book-formatting software.

For that matter, it is cheaper to ship paper books in bulk than to operate a web server where people can download eBooks. And easier on the environment. Yes, really.

Finally, for eBooks you have a much higher rate of unlicensed copying ... some 20%-30% of your readers won't have paid for the book. So you have to raise your cover price to cope with those losses (and the video game industry has proven over 25 years of effort that you cannot change that).

So consumers are going to be resistant to buying eBooks because they think they should be cheaper than "real" books, yet they are no cheaper to produce -- in many cases they are more expensive.

Yes, my sweetie works in publishing. Why do you ask?



Darcie, maybe you need a new job. Should I find you one at an eBook dot-com?

There you come to the other major hurdle -- rights. You can't put all those cookbooks into a search database until you have the rights to do so, which means negotiating separate legal agreements with hundreds of separate parties, some of whom are dead. And until you have a "stable" of several dozen major titles nobody will be interested in what you have to offer.

The rights issue cannot be underestimated. Consider:

• Google is still fighting over a dozen separate legal actions for their book search service, and has already paid out millions in settlements. Google may still lose their legal battles and be forced to shut down the service.
• My sweetie spends up to 45 hours per book negotiating rights for quotes and pictures.
• There are at least 6 different competing, incompatible eBook formats, and many titles are available only in one format.

More than waiting for the 20-somethings to grow up and become dominant consumers, we're waiting for the old publishing establishment and their attorneys to die off.

A paper book has residual value (though, admittedly, not that much), a DRM ebook has no residual value.

However, although the 15% figure is true as far as it goes, it isn't really true because the printing of paper books has implications. First off, it can't be printed cheaply by an individual, only large publishers. The paper-ness of the books means lots of logistics, and distribution channels which are absolutely necessary. Sometimes you'll have to pay to get into stores. This whole paper thing spawns an entire industry of stores, distributors, etc. All that is directly related to the need to move heavy books around and stock and display them. In addition, significant capital is needed to do a decent run.

For an ebook, say on just Kindle, if you can produce a PDF you can be publishing tomorrow and actually have a very significant market to sell to. The only people you'll have to split with is Amazon. This is very very different the paper books and comes about largely due to the *associated* costs of paper printing and all that it entails. Saying printing is only 15% of the cost is very misleading as it ignores the consequences of printing.

I don't think anyone will attempt to publish a vast collection of books into this platform; rather I figure someone will come up with a format that works, others will emulate it, and people will add to their own collection with new cookbooks. There will likely be a market for the classics - cookbooks that have stood the test of time. Rights for those volumes will be purchased or they will be republished by current rights owners into the new platform - I'm thinking JoC, MAoFC, Sauces, those kind of cookbooks.

I figure the ebook software/e-reader variations will go the way of Beta, LaserDisc, etc. and consolidate. Just as in those cases, it likely won't be the best techology but the best-marketed. The same will hold true for any kind of ecookbook platform - it will have to be compatible with the winning technology - or will it?

Fuzzy, if you can get me a job like that I would pay you a significant headhunter fee.

I want both. I won't give up my hard copies, but love having some of them electronically to search and have with me when out. I love old cookbooks and seeing which recipes were used a lot from the pages. When I open my mom's old cookbooks I can picture her cooking and it is a lovely memory. Hard metal does not give the same feeling.

Alina,

Welcome to the board!

Paul,

You're making the assumption that Amazon = zero overhead, which isn't at all accurate. They run literally thousands of servers to support their marketplace and online distribution. It's less overhead from a cost basis than shipping books to bookstores ... but only marginally so, around 20% less (the other discounts come from evading sales tax, something which is about to end).

I wasn't assuming no overhead at all. It isn't about the cost of shipping books, its about the barrier to entry. Because of the nature of printing and shipping and storing books, only a few companies can do it. Authors, generally, have to sell via these companies to reach regular consumers. These companies take a lot ( an awful lot ) more then 15%, because they own the channel. It isn't the cost of the printing that kills the author, it is the inability to compete. With Amazon, it is one step, and a simple, easy to replicate one at that; the barriers to entry are much lower. Publishing via Amazon is a very very simple process that a author can do in a single day, in essence, without promising their first born to the company. The traditional publishing companies have added huge fat onto the process ( just like the record companies ) on the basis of controlling the distribution. It isn't about how much the actual printing costs, it is about how much that process lets them leverage their control. E-books has the promise to break that control, and change very much who gets the money.

Paul,

I agree, that is the advantage to shifting to eBooks & Amazon; it breaks the stranglehold which Ingram (the national distribution monopoly) currently has on book distribution. If anything will drive the adoption of ebooks, it is that. I've said many times that what will drive ebook and other new publishing models will not be consumer demand, but rather the collapse of the old system.

It just doesn't materially lower the total overhead cost the consumer pays, that's all. Hence my response to Tatoosh. Consumers have the expectation that ebooks should be cheaper than paper books, and they are not.

Apparently I am, as usual, a day late and a dollar short: link to CIA Professional Chef app.

I was thinking of getting an Android tablet but this makes me reconsider.

None of this would do for me. My cell phone is so old it almost has a rotary dial.
fitzie

I'm conflicted...

I love to cook out of a book and can enjoy reading a cookbook like a novel...cooking by Kindle seems downright sinful! But... I absolutly LOVE the searchability and portability of electronic media.