Well, I asked for a reason or an excuse why publishers continue charge so much for ebooks. Yesterday, via MobileRead, comes… the excuse, in the form of an interview with a German publisher, Michael Justus, who defends his ridiculous pricing.
Check out the original post for full details, it’s irritating, interesting stuff. Essentially Justus argues that ebooks cost as much to make and distribute as paper books. He complains (at length) about things like having to convert documents to multiple formats, and editing the metadata, by which I assume he means crippling his books with DRM.
At best, this is an argument for a universal format and against DRM. At worst, it smacks of an office full of Luddites who think the intern using Google is casting some kind of magic spell. eBooks simply do not cost as much to distribute as paper books; if they did, how could some publishers already be distributing dirt-cheap ebooks in multiple formats? And how could Matthew McClintock from Many Books do it for thousands of books for free? (He doesn’t convert them by hand, you say? Shocking.)
The answer might well be that those two examples don’t use DRM. If this is the case, the choice for Justus is not to keep prices high or die, as he claims, the choice is to eradicate DRM or die (doing things more efficiently also probably wouldn’t hurt). It would be easier to cut Justus some slack on the DRM issue if the recording industry hadn’t just gone through this same dog and pony show for the past decade.
There are two ways that these old-media publishers can transition into the digital world:
- They can embrace epublishing themselves, and find a business model that works. Or,
- They can let somebody else finds that model and watch themselves become irrelevant before they know what hit them.
Right now, it looks like Justus is aiming for#2.
[read the full, long list at MobileRead]
