Skip to main content

Great Article about Ebooks

Hot off the presses from Paid Content: http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-book-business-twists-in-to-new-shapes-to-face-its-first-digital-challen/

Selected Quotes:

The entire publishing industry is going down the drain,”   

"In the current e-book Top 50 on Kindle, there are only five titles priced at £5 or above. "


We’re facing stiff competition from individual self-publishers and potentially giant technology companies with deep pockets,”

Comments

Anonymous said…
Absolutely right about the self publishers. Someone who prices their ebook at from $3-$10 on Amazon-US will keep 70% of the sales price. This is about 5 times the percentage a typical print author will get. And some authors find they can make good money even with $.99 books (on which they keep 30%).

Even if a self-publishing author has to pay for editing and layout themselves, this kind of disparity will be hard for a print publisher to beat.
mbp said…
Hi Neowulf. When authors start to realise this in large numbers it will change the balance of power in the industry. Publishers can still provide useful services but my guess is that they will have to accept a lesser role as service providers rather than content owners.

Popular posts from this blog

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein...

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p...

If there is a God I think they are a God of fractals

Life is infinitely complex. In the language of mathematics it is everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable. This is the definition of a fractal.  The thing about fractals is that you can zoom in as far as you like and it never gets any less complex. I think life is like that. At one level you see kings and emperors and their epoch defining movements. Zoom in and you see common people arguing over the price of corn. Zoom in further and it is just one person trying to decide what clothes to wear. I think that God, if there is a God inhabits all of these levels and all of the complexity that each entails.