Well, for a book that is only an e-book and for the labour that went into it (as Konrath describes), it sounds about right - he'll probably hit a good price point to move plenty of copies with that.

There is a correlation between price and perceived value, but when you're dealing with the online, there is also a history of what you could term as "free swag." When it comes to the 'net, the cheaper you can move something, the better. The big question is how much does it cost you, and how much do you have to make back to break even?

Taking any major publishing company as an example, most of the cost involved in bringing a book into print is labour. A major publisher has editors, typesetters, copyeditors, cover artists, etc. Production is one of the smallest costs (particularly when the print run is thousands of copies).

A small publisher like mine, or what the authors in the article are doing, reduces most of the labour costs to zero. That leaves you with figuring out the profit margin. So, to take a $10.00 cover price book as an example, going through the usual channels to bookstores, the breakdown of where that cover price is as follows:

$4.00 goes to the bookstore.
$1.50 goes to the wholesaler.
$3.50 goes to the publisher (and the author - for the sake of simplicity, we'll put the royalties in here).
$1.00 goes to the printer (these last two are very rough - I've only dealt with PoD print runs rather than large ones, so I don't have solid figures on the price per book of a large print run).

Or, to look at it another way, the wholesaler buys the book for 55% off the cover price, and sells it for 40% off the cover.

So, the calculation of what will be profitable comes down to how many units you need to sell to break even at X cover price. If you have no labour costs, no print costs, and 70% (approx. $2.10) is going to you, that's pure profit, and right in line with what you'd see in the breakdown above.

I never like articles like this - it reminds me a bit too much of the earlier adopter chatter back in 2000 when my own e-book was published (and, despite having everything going for me except not being Stephen King, proved to have an almost non-existent market). Certainly Konrath is describing some benefits to self publishing, so long as you have the savvy and editing skill to pull it off. But when it comes to trumpeting e-books as a better way in general than the printed book, he's giving a very skewed picture.

Will he get a greater percentage of the royalties by self publishing an e-book through Amazon? Absolutely. Part of self publishing is keeping all the profits. Will he make more money than he would releasing a printed book?

That, however, is a much different question. And for that, you have to run the numbers.

Depending on the time of year, the total American book market (net sales) can be anywhere from around $450 million to $1.5 billion per month (there are large peaks and valleys, which is why you get the huge variations). The e-book market occupies around $22 million of this per month (it, oddly enough, has a general but very slight upwards slope, and does NOT have large peaks and valleys). As far as I recall, the audio book will take up around $15 million or so per month, but that's not a number I pay too much attention to, so don't quote me on it. So, for every dollar earned by an e-book, print books will earn anywhere from $20 to $65, depending on the time of year.

Now, these are all very rough figures. The Association of American Publishers tracks this in far more detail on a month-by-month basis. The point is, though, that while a well-established author with a loyal fanbase can mitigate a large portion of this disparity, an average book published only as an e-book can deprive itself of over 90% of its potential income.

(That, for example, is why in my business I use e-books mainly for promotional stuff - they just don't have a large enough market base to support them outside of marketing for what I do.)

So, will Konrath keep a greater percentage of the profit per book? Absolutely. Will he make more money than he would publishing a print volume? Highly unlikely.

I think there's an assumption you're making here that isn't necessarily valid.

I have little doubt of what you say about your observations of the developing world today. But, you're also making the assumption that as the 3rd world nations develop, the issues that keep books too expensive and difficult to come by there will remain the same. I don't think that's necessarily going to be the case.

What I think is more likely is that as the 3rd world nations develop, the standard of living, earnings, and the literacy rate will rise. So, where before a publishing market wasn't feasible, it will become so, and somebody will found publishing companies and printers to fill that gap. Paper books will no longer be as prohibitively expensive, and that market will grow - and because it's a product not associated with requiring the consumer to use technology, it will have a wider reach than the electronic book will. After all, an e-reader or a computer is far more expensive than a book. If you've barely got a disposable income in the first place, what are you going to spend your money on? A $150-$300 electronic device, or a $10 book?

(That's one of the problems I've actually got with the OLPC program. I'm all for raising literacy and promoting reading among the disadvantaged, but we're talking about areas that frequently aren't too far away from subsistence economies. Giving laptops to poor villages in Africa is nice, but what that village probably needs is help to keep from starving. A starving kid with a laptop is still starving - s/he just now gets to play with a laptop as s/he goes hungry. We in the developed world may have gained far more from the program than the developing world ever has, or is likely to. Solving the hunger, the African energy crisis, and the political corruption endemic to the developing world is far more important. Now, I'm not going to say that OLPC won't help - for all I know, there could indeed be a very positive ripple effect. But in a lot of places, it's going to be little more than a gimmick, particularly if you put the laptops in places where the infrastructure isn't in place to support them.)

It's even worse than that in this case. According to the article, he was compromising other people's accounts using fake websites, and then using those accounts to send his spam so that it would appear to be from their friends. So, it's not just spam in this case - it's fraud and identity theft.

If it were up to me, he would also be going to jail.

And I think you're an asshole just looking to pick a fight. If you don't believe me, try it out and judge for yourself. In any event, I'm done with this discussion.

No "feels" about it. It loads in about 1/4 the time of XP, it brings up programs in about half the time of XP, and it can use all 6 GB of RAM that I have. To top it off, it's easier to use than XP, has extra features that are more useful than what is in XP, and it doesn't have the security holes of XP.

So, yes, Windows 7 is better than Windows XP. Microsoft actually got it right this time. If you have a problem with this, then that's your problem.

"No, no it's not. Not even slightly. Unless you are comparing XP32 to Win7 64 bit."

That's pretty much exactly the comparison. XP doesn't have a lot of support for 64-bit - there was a version of Windows Server that was the XP equivalent, but it was not something with wide distribution or driver support.

Windows 7 does have a 64-bit version with proper driver support, and yes, I have found it around twice as fast as XP on my system.

"It's a shame that more people don't just build their own computers and save money, rather than buying a pre-built with pre-installed garbage (software and such, that is). As for Windows 7, there's simply no groundbreaking reason(s) for people to upgrade."

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. My experience has been that between the streamlining and the extra speed (on a dual core 64-bit Athlon with 6 GB of RAM, Win7 is faster than XP is), and the extra security features, Windows 7 is heads-and-shoulders above XP. It IS better.

However, at the same time, Windows XP is a good system that does what it needs to, and generally does it well. And, I can understand why somebody would keep using it rather than upgrade when they don't need to.

Aside from which, building your own system does require a decent amount of knowledge, and time. For a lot of people, buying a pre-built system is the better way to go. Uninstalling the garbage is easier than building the system from scratch.

First off, I used to be a dedicated XP user. It was a very good operating system, and I didn't have any urge to upgrade until I bought a new laptop with Windows 7 on it. I liked what I saw enough that I made the decision to upgrade then and there, and Windows 7 has been my primary OS ever since (I found it faster and streamlined in intelligent and useful ways). But, your mileage may vary.

However, it makes sense that we'd be seeing this trend in the marketplace. One of the problems with holding what is effectively a monopoly position is that you become your own biggest competitor. Windows 7 isn't really squaring off against Linux or Mac (although those are competitors), it's squaring off against Windows XP. The same thing has happened multiple times on versions of MS Office.

It seems to me that what will happen is that the main driver of increasing the market share will be new computers with Windows 7 pre-installs, particularly since Win7 did not see the sort of backlash that Vista did. So, given a couple more years, Windows 7 will have a much larger market share.

"There's no bait-and-switch here. People are getting exactly what is advertised. Where's the problem?"

It's all about perception. Nobody is going to see it that way. What they're going to see is Intel selling them a crippled chip, and then demanding money to uncripple it. Then there's Intel's competitor, who will be perceived as selling them a chip that is exactly as advertised.

When I got into business, I didn't have a business degree, or formal training, so I had to figure a lot out for myself. I realized, after a great deal of thought, that a good, growing business ultimately came down to three rules:

1. Produce a good product that customers will want.
2. Make it as easy as possible for customers to buy your product.
3. Never give customers a reason NOT to buy your product.

Intel's move directly violates rule #3 in a pretty big way. I'd almost call it corporate Darwinism in motion, considering the PR hit Intel is about to receive.

Um...you really don't know much about the book industry, do you?

"The main difference is that for physical books, the book can't be lent out to more than one person at a time. With e-books, this is an artificial barrier that makes absolutely no sense except as life support for a dying publishing industry."

Right - that argument makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. First off, the print book industry is in no danger from e-books - if you do an analysis of the sales figures you'll find that they act like different markets, and the print book market is quite healthy. But, even if that wasn't the case, particularly with large publishers, any time a library loans out a book, a small royalty is paid to the publisher, and the author. In short, the library is a revenue source.

So, in fact, it is not in the best interests of publishers to have a cap on how many people can take out a book at a time. In fact, it would be in the best interests of the publishing industry if these library e-books had no caps whatsoever.

And, frankly, speaking as an author, a publisher, and a grad student, having the cap makes no sense to me at all. If the benefit of an e-version of a book in a library is the ability for the book to always be available, making it artificially unavailable defeats the purpose of having an e-version in the first place.

I can vouch for that...

I used to work in the public sector. A few months before I left to return to school, we changed computer consultants to a new guy, and to this day I swear he was deliberately creating problems so he could bill us for solving them.

It started off with a computer audit. Now, I'm not a professional computer consultant, but I've been around computers pretty much my entire life, and my father used to be a consultant. My idea of an audit is to generate a list of what programs are running, what anti-virus programs are in place, what firewall is in place, what processes are running, etc. So, when I found out that my computer was about to be audited, I was prepared to be away from it for half an hour to an hour.

Instead, he checked the Windows version, and moved on.

Now, to understand this story, one of the things you have to understand is that I was an unofficial IT guy in the office. And, I had taken a couple of steps for basic security (this was back around 2003), such as moving everybody away from Outlook Express and onto Netscape mail. It was a small Windows 2000 network in a small office, and so long as it was kept behind a hardware firewall and nobody did anything terribly stupid, it was fine aside from the occasional software glitch.

The first recommendation that he put in, and management enforced, was to take everybody off Netscape and put them back onto Outlook Express. Massive infection of the entire network followed. Then, as I was the guy who started complaining that something was wrong here, he tried to blame me for hacking the system.

Now, this wasn't the main reason I left to go back to school (one of the problems with working in social services is that it can be very soul destroying work, and I had reached the point where I just couldn't continue any further), but it definitely gave me a good dose of snake oil before I left...

And how, exactly, did you get your hands on Lrr's data?

You and your pathetic planet will be crushed for this! Just as soon as Single Female Lawyer is over! Besides, it's not like a thousand years ago somebody cut the transmission and-

No! Now we will never know how it ends!

THERE WILL BE VENGEANCE!

The problem is that the scenario would be a bit closer to this:

Amazon: We want you to give us the lowest price on your e-book.

You: Okay, I can do that.

Amazon: Oh, and by the way, if you don't sign an agreement saying that we will always get the lowest price, we're not going to carry your e-book.

You: Um...

Amazon: And if you ever give somebody a lower discount than we're getting anytime in the future, you had better give us that discount too, or we'll de-list your e-book and nail you for breach of contract.

You: But...

Amazon: That's the price of doing business with us.

Now, I've exaggerated this a bit for dramatic effect, but this is the basic scenario. It's Amazon and Apple trying to force e-book publishers into contracts that not only dictate how they do business with Apple and Amazon, but with everybody else too.

Hey, you should have seen Smurf Rescue! That had killer small fences, gentle rises, and tufts of grass...