NewBookEconomy

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There is no doubt that the printed book will - slowly - give way to electronic book publishing, which has the potential to makes books much cheaper and more available. Currently this development is slowed by high e-book prices, bad e-book-reader systems and a lack of e-book quality control. In short: if you buy a book at the bookstore, you can be sure that an economic system has checked the book quality and its chances in the marketplace because it is expensive to publish a printed book and its easy to lose money in this process. This is not always the case with online-books or e-books, because their production-costs are (with exception of the given work of the author) practically nil.

In the economic exchange of author and reader, the authors get only about 10% of the shop price. If he could self-publish his book directly on the internet, reaching a larger audience he would be better off, even if he would sell his book at 10% of the current price. Nobody would think twice paying $ 1.50 for a book-download. The problem is quality and marketing, of course. Something must replace economic reasoning and provide lecturing feedback, overall quality control and trust to the reader/buyer. This role could be taken by an open wiki book community, or a cluster of specialized book communities - acting as a ReflectionCommunity - which could provide feedback, beta-reading, PeerReview, quality-labels, and a marketing platform to reach the readers.

Additional aspects:

PrintOnDemand -- to provide printed copies when needed, rendered as the reader wants it (paper, size, font size, ...)
a new open book file format -- that can be rendered on any device according to reader needs, beyond traditional page layout (columns width, fonts and font size, ...)

The overall advantage of a community-driven book process for authors, readers and the society could be tremendous. Only the online community can start such transitions, because corporations see $ in proprietary formats and hardware and ruin the e-book-acceptance by bad prize-performance ratios. -- HelmutLeitner

See also TheProcessedBook

My Faculty is undergoing a project to digitize the entire Canadian corpus. It costs $12.50 to mail a book by inter-library loan. It costs $2.50 to re-shelve a book. It costs $10 to robotically scan a book and e-mail it (not amortizing overhead of purchasing and maintaining the robot). -- SunirShah

: Does the library have bulk licenses to do that? How can they be obtained? -- FranzNahrada

I think they are starting with books out of copyright. -- SunirShah

There are now things like the Kindle and related, dedicated e-book readers. Everyone thinks they're a ripoff, but to be honest, Amazon is only making 50 cents or so worth of profit on those $9.99 new books. The price point is too high, but it still barely covers the costs and whatever the publisher sees fit to skim off the top. On the other hand, the fact that you can port PDFs into these machines means you can put CC-licensed works - and public domain works, such as those by Project Gutenberg - onto said e-readers. --NatalieBrown

NewBookEconomy

Discussion