Comment Re:the good and the meh (Score 1) 271
Not sure what you mean by the idea that we "play favorites" at O'Reilly. I'd love to hear details so I can respond.
I can respond to the idea that we pay the lowest royalty rate, and your ideas about ebooks.
It's true that some publishers have higher nominal royalty rates than we do, but most of them take big "reserves against returns" that mean that you actually get a lot less than you think you do. Or they have a higher rate for some sales, but a lower rate for others, such that your blended rate for all sales is much lower than you expect. We offer one rate for all sales. That's a feature, not a bug.
I'll also point out that a royalty is a percentage. A higher percentage of smaller sales is still less money last time I looked. And at O'Reilly, we have the highest revenue per title of any publisher except Microsoft Press (whose volumes are lower but prices are much higher.)
Regarding ebooks, it's an misconception that the costs are much lower for ebooks. The costs of printing, returns, and warehousing are only about 20% of our net dollars we get from books (or about 10% of the list price). (If you've done the math on the previous sentence, you see that the retailer gets at least half of the list price.) So the costs aren't all that much lower for ebooks. And the consumer is demanding the savings. Ebooks are generally sold at a significant discount off the print book price, so the net to the publisher (and author) is actually lower than for print books.
Meanwhile, having an aggressive program for ebooks means we've had to invest millions of dollars over many years to build the market. If you think that ebooks means just putting a pdf on your website, you're missing the boat. The differences between publishers in their ability to get ebook revenues are enormous. There are actually as many ebook channels to sell through now than print outlets. For us, Safari Books Online is the biggest, but Stanza on the iPhone is coming on strong, as is the Kindle, Scribd, with many others entering the market. (Safari is actually our second biggest revenue source after Amazon, ahead of Barnes & Noble. It's the only ebook channel right now that generates enough to make it one of our top ten revenue channels, though Stanza and direct ebook sales from oreilly.com are coming on strong.) Building channels like this costs money - big sales force etc. It's not actually the kind of low cost revenue people imagine.
In fact, if your publisher pays a significantly higher royalty for ebooks, it's likely that they are just treating ebooks as "gravy." If they don't take them seriously, neither should you. Ebook sales are now at least 20% of our total revenue and climbing. When they are 50% or more, you'll see all those publishers with outlandish ebook rates scrambling to