Article - Why New Books Don't Sell on the Kindle: The Price of the Intangible

[KindleMom]

I agree that the kid-friendly e-reader is a must!!! However, I don't know how they would ever have any parental controls, at least in regards to content "ratings" if that was your meaning. I think the best kind of parental control is not having a wireless connection so that the child can't download directly to the reader. Then the parents will have to take some responsibility for which books are purchased and downloaded to the device. Definitely food for thought though...

Which would mean no Whispernet.    I am confident this would be a simple thing to add to Kindles - just like folders would be.  I just think there isn't enough market for it or Amazon doesn't think there's enough market for it. 

It took a few years for cell phones to have parental controls but now they do because kids are a huge market for the cell phone industry.  So I think it'll happen in the ereader genre too, especially as more and more children and teen books are released as ebooks.  Many of our favorites are still not available.

In my mind I see the parental controls as part of the content manager or the "Manage Your Kindle" page on amazon.com.  As a parent I could designate which books could show up on my child's content manager and those would be the only ones s/he could download.  And I would be able to turn off web access and purchasing ability.

[911jason]

That would make sense... When I hear parental controls, I automatically think about the "rating" of the content, i.e. PG, R, MA, etc., and I can't imagine that form of control would ever make it to the book world.

[Bards and Sages (Julie)]

Pre-production, I suspect this would be less with e-books and even just an average book but let's leave it at:  $3.55

Actually, your pre-production costs go UP, not down.  For a publisher you are still paying copyeditors, proofreaders, designers, etc the same rate.  But now you are also having to spend additional money creating different formats.  For example, the typical publisher today designs in PDF format because that is the format the printers use.  However, Kindle and most other e-reader sites do not allow you to upload PDFs, or if they do they convert them to be beyond recognition to your original formatting.  So you now how to create a unique ebook format which often requires a duplicate proofreader and designer to make sure it looks right.

Marketing (majority of published books get next to no marketing so let's go with 1/2 that for an average book and I think I'm being too generous there since I know many a smaller author having to do their own publicity since the publishers can't be bothered) $1

1. If a smaller author is doing all of their own publicity, they are published through a hack publisher and not a real publisher.  Just because someone has a website does not make them a real publisher (PublishAmerica, anyone?)  Publishers, real publishers, do in fact have marketing plans for their books. 

2.  Marketing includes, after all, sending out review copies to reviewers (the majority of whom still expect to get a print copy) placing ads in industry publications like BookPages ($400 for a small ad) which are sold in point-of-purchase areas such as Barnes and Noble and distributed to libraries.  You may think books are not being marketed because you don't see ads on TV, but book marketing is a different animal from other forms of marketing and it DOES go on and it does get expensive.  The bulk of marketing of book marketing is done direct to retailers just to encourage them to stock a book.  It can cost upwards of $15,000 just to get front of store space in a bookstore, particularly at holiday season.  And despite the rise of ebooks, most book sales are still generated from bookstores.  Which means publishers cannot afford to stop engaging in this form of publishing.  And in fact, as ebooks become more popularly, these costs will just shift to e-retailers.  After all, why do you think some new releases get front page display space from Amazon and other retailers?  Because the publisher paid for it. 

At the company's mall stores -- B. Dalton, Doubleday and Scribner's -- end-of-aisle, or endcap, displays cost $3,000 a title for one month; a two-month spot in "New Arrivals" costs $2,500, according to the documents.

And at Borders, publishers pay $15,000 to advertise a book with a 30 percent discount in a 1996 pre-Christmas issue of USA Today. This provides top-tier listing in ads and front-of-store display for the month.

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Wholesalers (folks who get the books moved from publishers to retailers - gone with ebooks)  $0

Again, not true.  The more titles a publisher has, the less likely they are NOT using either a middle man or additional staff to get books in the distribution chain.  Someone has to upload all of those books to the various retailers, and it will either be a wholesaler (like Mobipocket) or a staffer.  Neither is free.

And none of this factors in the non-book specific day-to-day operation costs of staff, accountants, lawyers, etc.  Each book sold has an overhead cost factored in to it.

Yes, the printing, shipping, and warehousing of books are eliminated with ebooks, but they do not account for nearly as much of the bulk of the price as everything else.  And considering that the average book sells 10,000 or less, no publisher could stay in business selling e-books for a couple of dollars. 

And don't forget that the retailers themselves are eating 40-60% of the retail price.  People complain about paying $10 for an ebook, but the publisher often is only seeing half of that.  It is already well known that Amazon is actually losing money per sale of books sold through traditional publishers, because those publishers couldn't afford to take $4-5 a book and still make money.  Meanwhile, way too many self-publishing authors are more than happy to sell their books for $1 and have Amazon pay them 35 cents on the dollar, creating the illusion that all publishers should in fact be able to sell e-books for such low prices.