Tag: ebooks

The cost of knowledge

As I was browsing Amazon this afternoon, I came across an interesting book about the relationship between the Duchy of Lancaster and the English Crown in the late Middle Ages. The historian of Britain in me squealed with delight until he saw the price: $140 for the Kindle edition. And that includes Amazon’s 20% discount!

Having spent several years in the Ivory Tower, I’m well aware that academic books are overpriced. I’ve spent a small fortune lining my bookshelves with titles like The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome, The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, and The Rise and Fall of the High Commission. Part of the reason for the inflated prices is that, let’s face it, these books aren’t exactly bestsellers. They’re big, bulky volumes that are almost always produced as hardcover editions to ensure maximum longevity. Their print runs are small since the vast majority of them are destined for purchase by academic libraries. I suspect that only a handful of them fall into the hands of private individuals. With such miniscule demand, you have to charge high prices in order to remain profitable.

But I’m not sure that same argument applies when ebooks are involved. For one thing, the press doesn’t have to worry about the cost of producing a physical copy since it’s all just a bunch of electrons. Charging $140 for something that exists solely on my Kindle is outrageous.

Unfortunately, I don’t see this situation changing any time soon. I don’t have any facts to back this up, but I suspect that the ebook revolution hasn’t exactly caught on in the academic market. Since academic libraries, not private individuals, make up the lion’s share of their sales, academic presses don’t have much incentive to lower their prices. And academic libraries are, to some extent, a captive market. If they want to have a respectable collection in a given field, they’re going to buy most of the new titles that are published in that field.

Thanks to the financial crisis gripping our institutions of higher education, university libraries have less money to spend on improving their collections. Perhaps academic presses will end up having to cut their prices in order to keep selling to these increasingly cash-strapped institutions. Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?

Even in the digital world, Formatting 101 is important

As I read more and more ebooks on the Kindle, I’m starting to detect a quality-control problem.  For example, in both of Aliette de Bodard’s Aztec mysteries (which are awesome, by the way), I’ve noticed formatting glitches galore.   Hyphens are missing.  Text is improperly italicized.  And in Mike Shevdon’s Sixty-One Nails, two characters’ dialogue will  often be smushed into the same paragraph, which makes for an incredibly confusing read.

Both de Bodard and Shevdon are published by Angry Robot, but the problem is not confined to one particular publisher.  I’ve heard reports of similar problems in ebooks published by other companies.  These kinds of basic formatting errors might have been understandable back in 2007, but ebooks have been around long enough that they should have worked out the kinks by now.   I have to wonder, do ebooks actually undergo any kind of independent proofreading?  Or do they just take the electronic files from the print edition and transform them into an ebook?