Comments on: The Thorny Issue of eBook Royalties

By: Mark Seabrook

Mark Seabrook — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:56:22 +0000

Most of the major eBook aggregators are charging around 50% for housing and distributing eBooks.

I do not agree with the comment of saying that publishing should therefore simply setup their own secure eBook repositories. As this is just not as simple or practical as it sounds.

Technical ease:
You require fairly in depth technical knowledge to put an eBook hosting and distribution system in place which is in line with industry standards (i.e. ePub files using Adobe Content Server). ACS4 is complex software which requires Java knowledge to setup and run,

Cost benefit:
If you do overcome the technical issues the next issue is cost. ACS4 costs around $10,000 once off and there are also annual licenses. For a small to medium publisher this probably does not make sense.

Reach / Integration:
The biggest issue however is that online retailers (Waterstones, Borders, etc) do not want to integrate their websites into multiple publishers eBook content stores. They want to deal with one aggregator who holds multiple publishers eBooks. Same as physical world – Publishers do not all have their own physical warehouses for good reason.

Sure you could sell off your own website and bypass the online book retailers, but you need to be realist about your ability to generate sales off your own website. Perhaps for niche publishers this is easier, but for general trade publishers I suspect most of your audience will visit the Waterstones, Gardners, etc websites looking for eBooks.

Being both a publisher and a distributor and having done a fair bit of research into the area of eBook warehousing and distribution I can say that it is not an easy or inexpensive process. You need to be a medium to large publisher to even consider this, and that still does not solve the ‘reach / integration’ issue.

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:18:03 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by authornarea: The Thorny Issue of eBook Royalties | Digital Book World – http://ow.ly/13mJM | #ebook #kindle #ipad…

By: David Nussbaum

David Nussbaum — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:43:12 +0000

RT @digibookworld: The Thorny Issue of eBook Royalties http://bit.ly/bs9e6w

By: Carles Dijous (AA)

Carles Dijous (AA) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:05:38 +0000

RT @AbreTusLibros: RT @alfaqueque make an ebook is not free and it have costs RT @DigiBookWorld – http://bit.ly/bs9e6w

By: Morgan Ives

Morgan Ives — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:41:51 +0000

It sounds to me as if Gardners book warehousing is ripping off the publishers, then, and publishers are passing that onto the authors. I’m a computer geek as well as a writer, so I can tell you it shouldn’t cost that much to build a secure “e-warehouse.” My company recently implemented a secure server for the federal government. It cost several thousand dollars, true, but once it was in, all they would pay is a couple hundred dollars per month maintenance fee and electricity. It could store up to eight terrabytes (2 with quadruple redundancy).

Independent publishers like Two Ravens Press need to do a little homework and implement their own e-publishing storage, if that’s really where 50% of revenue is going. It isn’t hard to do. If you are worried, simply set up a computer and don’t connect it to a network. You can transfer files to the network as needed using a USB drive. We also do that in the federal government, and it works just fine.