Bookstores [Was: Re: Going OT [Was: Re: Replacing PBXes with Open Source]]

[Ted Roche]

The savings aren't that easy to capture. Witness Safari and other 
publisher's efforts at ebook publishing. There's still author's 
royalties, maybe a buck a book or so, and the labor expense of 
technical editing, copy editing and layout. Then, there's marketing, 
advertising and promotion. Web site management may actually not be that 
much smaller a cost than printing press management. The publisher has 
to stay in business, too, so there's overhead and finally, if 
everyone's lucky, a little profit. So, you save on the costs of paper 
pulp, ink and shipping, and lose on the costs of online sales 
management. For large book runs, like Stephen King's latest or Harry 
Potter, the delta may be enough to see some price reductions for you. 
On smaller runs of technical books, it's a tough call.  The local 
retail outlet takes the biggest hit, but there really isn't any 
middleman getting cut out unless you self-publish, which is a whole 
n'other kettle of dead fish.

O'Reilly's got an intriguing idea with Safari that's closer to a lease 
plan for a ebook. Looks promising, although I don't know if it's 
actually profitable. And there's the risk, like iTunes, that if the 
publisher's gone, your access may disappear with them.

In a large time scale, I agree with Ben and maddog that paper will 
likely go the way of papyrus, but in the short run, it's much harder to 
predict. Master Yoda says  "Always in motion is the future." We live in 
interesting times!


Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com
On Aug 30, 2004, at 5:17 PM, Ken D'Ambrosio wrote:

> Michael Costolo wrote:
>
>> But why exactly would they do that? Same size, weight, etc. of a
>>
>> book, but needs batteries, has a screen that can break, and costs far
>> more than a common $10 or $15 paperback.
> Have you seen the price of low-cost notebooks these days?  Imagine one 
> with almost no CPU, a relatively small hard disk (the 20 GB Ipod disk 
> would work fine), minimal RAM, no legacy PCMCIA/serial/parallel/VGA, 
> and yet the ability to hold hundreds if not thousands of books?  Yeah, 
> I think -I'd- be willing to pay for that; after all, I spent $27 of 
> Harry Potter's latest installment, and there'll seven of those when 
> they're done, not to mention the untold dollars I've spent on Tolkien, 
> the OED, etc.  If the only costs I were paying were some marketing, 
> royalties and trivial distribution fees, I HAVE to imagine that 
> lifetime savings (for me, at least) would be in the thousands.
>
> $.02,
>
> -Ken
>
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