I think this is the number one reason. The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value.

I buy a fair number of non-fiction books and loved when ebooks emerged as a viable way to buy a book at what I perceived to be a reasonable price. Now that the agency model has been in force I've just shifted how I buy ... I buy used books from Amazon.

All the books I used to buy as ebooks the publisher was receiving revenue. Now, they don't receive any money from my purchases.

The book publishing industry still has a window of opportunity to transition to ebooks under their own direction, but it's almost closed. See the recording industry.

How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance?

This is a serious question: just a few days ago I was suggesting that a friend, twenty published books over the last thirty years, books you may have read or heard of, start a Patreon so that he might, for the first time in his life, afford health insurance.

People working full-time in publishing might have health insurance but are working for well below market (by outside of tech standards, which are pretty embarrassing) in some of the most expensive cities on earth. And they can't just move, because then they'd get converted to contract and lose their health insurance.

This is not to shame you for buying used books---that's fine, there's no way I'd have the library I do without them, and I grew up groveling the library and used bookstores because that was all we could afford. Readers are readers. But---and I encounter this again and again---readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.

(I think everyone, even people who simply don't want to work, should be able to eat and receive reasonable medical care. Authors not having healthcare is terrible, but no more terrible than unemployed people not having healthcare; the problem there is the crazy American healthcare system)

Or you know, let them do whatever they want, and price THEIR work however they want, and then either buy it or don't buy it.

Knowing about something and considering it fair and acceptable are two different things.

A logical argument would be: "they knew about working well below market so they shouldn't act surprised" (because knowing in advance and acting surprised are contradictory).

But being hurt and complaining? There's no logical contradiction between doing that and having prior knowledge that a choice would end bad for you.

(Besides they also know that for some authors that's not the case, and they could -- even legitimately for some -- think that they are better than them, and deserve the same money).

Also what's considered "market rate" and what's in 2016 a living wage have relatively little in common. Seven cents a word is the minimum 'professional' rate for short fiction, which very few people in 2016 can actually live solely on.

Or market rate of a field being the mean rate for workers of that occupation.

If it's work below market or gut chickens for a living people will tend to accept less than they feel they're worth.

But that's not the case, the market for the output of authors cannot sustain living wages, there is no 'market wage' to make. If you look closely at this and other creative professions, that has always been the case; there is always more people that want to make a living with creative work than there are people that want to pay well enough for that work so that the creators can live.

This is structural and unlikely to change barring something like basic income. The usual answer given to aspiring creator is both to generate the income you need to live in the service industry, say as a waiter, and also to be your own agent and pimp out your professional services yourself.

The number of hours a person has available in their life to enjoy reading books is constant, or at least capped pretty close to where it's at now.

There are already too many books for anyone to read everything that might interest them in their lifetime.

So what's the use of new fiction books? Haven't enough already been written to serve everyone's needs? I agree that we need fewer fiction authors and the market is showing that with their low compensation.

My guess is that the long term earnings for writing will move closer to zero. The best writers working for the best organizations will still be able to make a lot of money.

We have just barely started moving in to a period where online education turns billions of uneducated third world/developing country citizens in to highly educated English speakers.

I'm not the OP, but seeing as most of my favourite authors are already dead (some have been so for more than a century) I would so: "not so much". The "would someone think of the content creators" mantra kind of works (up to a point) in the music and movie industries, where Taylor Swift doesn't compete against long-time dead J.S. Bach, nor does Star Wars compete against Melies's films, while any new fiction author has to compete against long-time dead authors like Proust, Kafka, Joyce or Ray Bradbury.

I have a long fondness for Bradbury, Shelley, Conan Doyle, etc., but they didn't write, oh, Hal Duncan's VELLUM, or Christopher Barzak's THE LOVE WE SHARE WITHOUT KNOWING, or Silvia Moreno-Garcia's SIGNAL TO NOISE---I don't think they could have been written before the last decade or so, and I don't see that they compete any more with Proust than Taylor Swift does. There will always be a market for new fiction.

I suspect the answer will be a switch to "open publishing", with authors and editors collaborating via websites like on OSS programs and then monetizing on "stores", hence keeping costs so low that they can work on economies of scale.

Thing is with ebooks the author should make more money, there's a wider accessible market, lower production cost. But publishers moved to close the market and to increase the selling price whilst at the same time accruing the added profit from the reduction in production cost.

The blame here shouldn't be on those buying the books who refuse to be screwed by the publishers.

Readers don't care about the booktrade, they want to read books and have authors rewarded for writing them, the booktrade somehow doesn't seem to help much to this end.

Instead of starting a Patreon, perhaps your writer friend could sell books to readers rather than to a publishing house?

The market is... different. Wider in some ways, narrower in others. Young adult fiction is largely nonexistent in ebook, still, because young adults' access to e-reading devices is still more limited than adults', and they are less likely to discover fiction online than through more traditional channels.

The production costs are, again, not significantly lower in ebook than print.

> Thing is with ebooks the author should make more money

While that's been the going theory in some parts for a while, in practice it hasn't turned out that way.

But the prices have been / are often higher.

I see that good ebooks have some extra typesetting and such, but that should be largely automated with the production of print ready copy.

How can they not save on paper, presses, covers, delivery, distribution?

Yes editing, proofing, marketing, cover design, etc., still costs.

Devices don't seem that discounted that there should be an extra load per book to post for them.

Do you have a source for eBook production costs, would be interested to look at financials vs. traditional publishing.

(I note that I can order quantity one of the book I have on Amazon Createspace for $3.75 plus shipping.)

...depending on how many copies are sold, at the minimum. (Physical production and transportation will come to dominate at some point.)

...and, of course, this means that mass market paperbacks should be priced at the same level as first-run hardcovers.

> readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.

The actual cost of a book has no bearing on it's value. You could spend a billion on editing, publicity, materials, etc. and if no one wants to read it good luck.

Besides, the point of dining out is not getting stuffed with food on the cheap to avoid hunger.

You know this adds nothing to the discussion, and only encourages people to disregard everything you're saying, right?

I'm a good cook, but my favorite burger place charges around 12eur for a burger and I'm happy to pay it because I can't easily recreate the same at home, and it's freaking delicious.

"Because I want to socialize with rich people" is beyond absurd.

I try to buy records/merch from (some of) my favourite bands. I value them greatly. They'll never make a decent living from it.

> How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance?

I give to charities to take care of those who can't take care of themselves; I buy entertainment to be entertained.

> readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.

Then maybe the profession of writer will gradually go away, much as the profession of fencing master (the real sort, who taught how to win in a fight, not at sport) has.

I must confess to being baffled by all this talk of typesetting, for the following reasons:

1) My ebook readers (Calibre and iBooks, mostly) algorithmically render and reflow the text to arbitrary typefaces, sizes, columnar layouts, etc. Isn't this "typesetting?" And isn't it taking place entirely in software? [0]

2) Latex consumes a plain-text (aka neither designed nor typeset) file as input and produces tolerably-good machine typeset output. Its output is vastly better than plenty of well-regarded periodicals such as [1], which proves by construction that good-enough machine typesetting can be implemented.

[0] I'm not claiming iBooks typesetting is remotely comparable to what's found in a Random House hardcover, but rather that no hand typesetting at all takes place for most (all?) ebooks.

[1] http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/

When I'm translating plain text (Markdown-ish) input to LaTeX, I spend a bit of time going through by hand making sure all my formatting has converted correctly, any accents or non-roman characters are correct, the single- and double-quotes are correct, I haven't accidentally copy-pasted any ligatures, I have included hyphenation for nonstandard words, I've included any relevant non-breaking spaces, figures and headings and captions are flowing correctly, etc. etc. And all of these are still necessary when producing an ebook.

It's maddeningly detail-oriented, but the results are really noticeably much better, and in many cases make the difference between the text being readable and not. It's a bit like the cue dots at the movie theater---if you're not looking for them, you don't notice your uninterrupted experience unless the projectionist screws something up.

Given that ebooks are electronic, perhaps they could use some sort of pop out window for larger code snippets, so that they could be scrolled rather than in page format.

(Some of my other favorite conversion errors: Endnotes or references not hyperlinked. Chapters and other headings not correctly marked-up. Page numbers or other irrelevant header/footer material not stripped. Footnotes, margin notes, or other relevant header/footer material stripped. ...As you can tell, I'm great fun at cocktail parties.)

In addition, if you really want to put out a quality product you have to be aware of how each e-reader renders the stuff you send them. Different e-readers process the same file differently and not all support the promised features of epub 3.0. It's best to know up front what each supports in terms of images and scaling, and then write with that in mind. Again, far beyond latex.

Yup. For a typical hardback, the physical costs (printing, shipping, and storing) are about $3.25. Here's an article from a few years ago that looked at the money side of paper books and ebooks: [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.ht...

The costs of modern day e-books are real, but for many genres markets its possible that buyers are simply willing to tolerate a book that's objectively worse (more errors, worse design, illustration by total unknowns, fonts free sources instead of foundries).

Rather than continuing to participate in the traditional industry, I think a lot of authors will have to self-publish and realize that if they can't give their book the love needed to not "make your eyes bleed" then their work will fail in the marketplace. They can't rely on someone else to take a manuscript and clean it up to a publishable version anymore.

There's just not space for those middlemen and helpers in a lot of genres market, unless you are a best seller.

That said, the market for freelance book production people is actually much better than it was a few years ago, for precisely the reason that there's just more money in the market now.

This used to be the selling point of publishing through Springer, for instance. But now it seems very little editing or copyediting is done. I am reading "Novelty, Information, and Surprise" put out by Springer in 2012 (math/stats/information theory) and there are two typos in the first paragraph of the introduction. It doesn't feel like the rest of the writing saw an editor either.

I'm looking for the rise of a more streamlined process for hiring your own editor as people realize that publishing through the mainstream doesn't get you editing or royalties (although it still does give a lot of street cred or something to put on your CV!).

Publishers, however, take their share per-copy. And, IIRC, the final profits are divided about 50/50 between author and publisher.

Charlie may be leaving a significant chunk of money on the table, given his popularity.

I wonder how much more work it would be to get a good relationship with a single priced editing service over a traditional publisher. Hey, maybe you could even get your agent to do that.

But I don't know how the relative economics work for an established author like Charlie. Empirically, most known authors seem content to stay with publishers so I'm guessing it makes economic sense for them. But I don't really know.

It seems to me that a combination of technology and time should be sufficient.

I know I have read books that seem to have missed spell check... Really annoying.

Also, I say again: copyeditors and proofreaders are cheap. Doing that work myself makes about as much sense as doing anything else I could outsource cheaply.

Source: I'm a smalltime author and publisher.

What will happen is that some publishers fail to adapt to a digital economy and are replaced by upcomers who are perfectly adjusted to it. Publishing companies will not disappear because they fill a function in the industry.

Are Amazon and Netflix "studios"? No, but they do produce high-quality video content. Is Louis CK a "studio"? No, but he's producing a TV series.

Publishers' functions (content editing, packaging, distribution, marketing and merchandising) are being split and reorganized in different ways. Verticals built on the new production chain will look very different from current publishers.

They pretty much are in today's sense of "studio." The days of MGM having a bunch of actors under contract and cranking out movies on their backlots and sound stages is pretty much ancient history. Studios are mostly the moneymen for independent production companies--which is the case whether the studio's name is Fox or Netflix.

Publishers' function will be close to exactly the same, just built on top of a digital infrastructure and organization.

Netflix and Amazon are studios when they do the same work as a studio.

Recommendation engines are real and are improving. Spellcheck fixes typos and some decent neural-network training can be pushed into literary land (already MS Word "dares" here and there, and that's not even centralized). Would a "digital editor" be foolproof, or particularly good? No, but it would likely do a lot of the grunt work fairly reliably, so you can shrink the workforce or increase output (more books, argh). When I hear of the "slush pile", I cringe. That's a job for a machine and not a very smart one at that.

> Netflix and Amazon are studios

No, they are content distributors who happen to produce content because of supply failures up the chain. The middlemen upstream are failing to see opportunities, so downstream is taking charge. The minute this changes, they will go back to being content distributors because that's what they do.

Netflix is a studio; you're trying to change the meaning words because the facts don't fit you.

5000 sales is larger than most first print runs, a minority of books are bestsellers and sell hundreds of thousands, the majority sell just a few thousand and make very little profit if anything, this is why publishers offer an advance set against future royalties.

There is still a vestigial authority to a printed book (someone other than the author liked this) and a stigma attached to self publishing, so there is some value still to being published on paper, because the main benefit to most authors is reputational, not monetary. It will be interesting to see if that changes with ebooks. However, like print newspapers, mass-market print books are dead, they were always on thin margins but are now unsustainable. This will take a decade or two to work out, but it will happen.

There's also a sizeable fraction of the reading public of all ages who still prefer print books for a host of reasons both sentimental and practical. (The one I've just discovered: I can't read ebooks before bed because the blue light from the iPad screen keeps me up. Whoops.)

Ebooks have mostly killed the mass-market paperback, though---more's the pity for beach-reading and other circumstances where I don't want to have to worry about the physical condition of sensitive electronics.

Seriously, get a kindle - if you like reading you will absolutely not regret it.

Reading even more books than ever, since now I can turn its backlight setting to very low, and it's so much less light than my iPad ever was, while still being plenty to read with, and it's not bright enough to bother my SO if I read while she sleeps.

I am not a publishing industry insider, so these numbers are an educated SWAG, but let's see if they shed any light.

Let's say a top editor at a big-5 genre publisher makes $100k a year. That's way high, but we'll roll with it, 'cuz it makes the math work out nicely. Let's say they work on ten books a year, also probably high, but that's $10k/book. If they make $50k and work on five books a year that's still the right ballpark.

The art and production departments are shared across a publisher's whole line, or possibly even multiple imprints. Let's say the department costs $300k total and does thirty books a year, for $10k/book, which includes the cost of soliciting and paying the artist for the cover art, ebook and physical production, copyediting and proofreading.

We're up to $20k now.

Now we get to the fun part. Your big-5 publisher literally pays people to go read your book and then drive to all the bookstores in a geographic area and convince them to buy it. Figure that there are 10 of them in the US, each of them pulls in $50k, and they're repping 25 books a quarter, so 100 a year. That's another $5k on top just for their salaries, not counting their travel and expenses, for which $15k a person a year seems not unreasonable. And this isn't counting ad buys or any marketing, just plain sales. So figure half your book's total budget is sales.

So that's $40k/book for a midlist, 100k-word genre title from a well-regarded editor before we get to the author or the physical production.

(Things I'm leaving out: legal department, some kind of business/management structure, some kind of web site???)

Professional rates in fiction are a princely seven cents a word, so for an author who's worked a year on a book (not unreasonable) that's a whole $7k---but this book was acquired by a well-regarded editor at a good house, so let's say the author is getting a whole twenty cents a word, or $20k, for this year of labor. That's a third of the cost of the book so far. Accounting around authors in publishing gets weird---advances versus residuals, etc.; actually accounting in publishing is just plain weird, period---and a $20k advance is princely, but not unreasonably so.

So then the publisher has spent $60k on your book, and wants to earn its money back and then some.

My sense is that 5k sales is a low number, and certainly you aren't going to get a $20k advance next time, if your next book gets picked up at all. Publishing is a hits business---most sales happen in the first few months---so rates matter more than absolute numbers. 5k sales over ten years might finally earn out your advance, but 5k sales in the first month will get the second book of your trilogy picked up. 100k sales is John Scalzi territory, and my sense is that 30k sales is comfortable midlist territory.

Now, 30k sales on $60k spent out of the gate works out to $2/book, or $8/book profit at $10/book ($13 list with an Amazon/wholesale cut of 30%), but remember that in a hits business not nearly every book will sell even that many copies, but no one can predict ahead of time which ones, so publishers need to invest in many more books which won't sell to find the ones that will. It's anecdotally reported in the publishing industry---and I think it's evident in the financials as well---that breakout, millions-of-copies-sold success 50 Shades of Gray subsidized essentially all of Random House's other books for a year or two.

It depends on your hits business how bad the ratio is, but in genre publishing figure that less than half of books earn out for the author, so at $60k/book that's 6k sales minimum, which not every book makes. (Classic scenario: publisher gives you a big advance on your outline but then decides not to sell or market the book when you turn it in and they don't like it, but they don't want to pay the kill fee, so they rush it through production, ignore it in marketing, print the minimum required copies, and hope nobody buys them. Whoops.)

The key expense self-publishing discussions usually miss is really the sales and marketing one, followed closely by editorial. And freelance editors do exist and are quite good, so if you're self-publishing, consider one. I don't know of any freelance book salespeople, though. For some reason salespeople are very good about getting paid.

I should add that this is not to say that, if you're self-publishing, you should expect to spend $60k on your book. My sense is that even $10k/book is on the high side. Certainly out here in the freelance world I would tell an author expecting to put that much up to self-publish her book that she was being taken for a ride, and not the fun kind.

Remember that you're giving up sales and marketing, and you're not paying yourself an advance, so you're down to $20k already, and then you're working with newer artists and freelance professionals. Depending on how good you are at the various aspects of the work (and don't kid yourself here, he says mostly to himself), figure $3-5k is a decent ballpark for an anthology or a full-length novel. It's not going to sell 6k copies either, but then paying more probably wouldn't help its sales any. Still, do your research, don't shortchange your business partners, pay for quality where it counts, and don't pay for vanity publishers (Author Solutions, etc.)

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/23/japanese-booksh...