Done day before yesterday (20100228 Su)

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Hmm. A pretty decent day, though with a lot of scrambling around the new DSL line. It turns out that the stupid DSL router really insists on having exactly one IP address on each port, and the one that it puts into "super-dmz" mode really has to be DHCP-controled. Otherwise all hell breaks loose, including the set-top boxes not working. Gaak!

A little work on music, but not as much as I really needed to have done. A good walk (see step count), and I made a good one-pot dinner of corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes.

Done yesterday (20100301 Mo)

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Pretty good day again. My weight was down, finally, and no BPH symptoms. And a good IM session with Naomi talking about our setlist for Norwescon. I'll have my work cut out for me for the next month learning new chords, though. At least I was able to find them, finally.

Colleen's collapsable walker arrived, finally. She found it a little shaky and narrow enough that she keeps stubbing her toes on it; hopefully she'll get used to it, because it'll be terrific for travel.

The afternoon was mostly eaten up by my caregivers support group and shopping errands.

I had fun being interviewed by three high school girls (one the daughter of a close friend) about the Reformed Druids of North America for a class project. And some practicing, and some work on lead sheets. So...

Yeah; pretty good day. I'll take what I can get.

The day's link is to a comparison of How Much It Actually Costs to Publish an Ebook vs. a Real Book. More on that later.

The real cost of books

So... here's an article on Gizmodo about How Much It Actually Costs to Publish an Ebook vs. a Real Book, based on Making the Case for iPad E-Book Prices at the New York Times.

Giz puts it all in a handy table -- I'll wait while you go and look -- that makes $13 for an ebook look like a fair deal compared to $26 for a hardcover. The publisher gets about the same amount in both cases. The bookseller -- Amazon, say -- gets $3.90 for the ebook, vs. $13 for the hardcover, which is fair because there's no inventory, floor space, or need to cover inventory that doesn't sell. The author gets a little less for the ebook: $3.25 vs $3.90. Printing, storage, and distribution for the hardback is only $3.25. Seems fair, right?

Not so fast.

Giz also says "There is no equivalent paperback market with lower costs to eke out more money later in a book's life (especially if the hardcover flops)." But isn't the ebook more like a paperback? The marginal cost of one more ebook is zero.

If you take out both the bookseller's and the publisher's cut from the ebook, you're down to a perfectly reasonable $4.53. That still includes $1.28 per copy for copyediting, design, and marketing. That means that an author who sells ebooks directly to the public can make money at a lower price.

And that, my children, is why crowdfunding works.

(I'm oversimplifying, of course. Unless you're already an established author or famous for some other reason, it's almost impossible to get your sales figures up to what a publisher could get for you. And so on. But the publishing industry still has to worry.)

Cross-posted to mdlbear and crowdfunding.