This whole issue of how ebooks are priced, what they’re worth to consumers, and how to make money off of them is actually pretty complicated. It’s also fascinating, at least to someone like me; for the first 18 months after I bought a Kindle I demanded that no publisher ever go above the $10 mark. (I’ve since softened my stance somewhat for new releases, although personally I don’t buy ebooks over $10 regardless.)

Two of the best explanations I’ve found come from published writers who have an obvious interest in what Amazon and publishers end up doing:

Read “Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight” by Charles Stross

Read “Why my books are no longer for sale via Amazon” by Tobias Buckell

Bonus! Read “Kindle Numbers: Traditional Publishing Vs. Self Publishing” by Joe Konrath for an alternate take on earning money from ebooks if you’re a midlist writer.

Set aside 10-15 minutes and read these two (or three) guys for some great insights, for example on Amazon’s reasons for holding to the $10 price point (hint: it’s not really for our benefit), on how much it costs to publish a high quality ebook, and on how to price more efficiently to take advantage of what different customers are actually willing to pay (hardcore fans are usually willing to give more support to their favorite authors).

This post originally appeared on Kindlerama.

(Photo: kretyen)

Blue Leaf Book Scanning Service (www.blueleaf-book-scanning.com) is a small Connecticut company that offers a mail-in scanning service for about 10.5 cents a page. Earlier this month, David Rothman at Teleread.org wondered whether it could serve as a viable solution for those with out of print or otherwise non-digital books, so I decided to try it out and document the experience.

To test it, I shipped an out-of-print book from my library and paid for only the most basic, nondestructive scanning service. (You can drop the per page cost to 8 cents if you don’t ask for the book back.) Davide Bianchini, the co-founder of Blue Leaf, says that they use a custom built overhead photo-based scanner, as well as an industrial page-fed scanner for the cheaper, book-gets-destroyed option.

After ordering it and paying via PayPal, I bought a padded envelope and shipped the book via media mail. Eight days later I received an email with a link where I could download the files, and two days after that the physical copy of the book was back in my possession via USPS Priority Mail.

As for cost, I spent just under $29, including shipping, for one 288-page hardcover. That should make it clear that the service isn’t being positioned as an alternative to buying e-books from publishers; it seems more suitable to the rare or out of print titles in your library (or for authors with out of print books they’d like to sell digitally–more on that below).

You should also know that Blue Leaf raised its prices since Teleread’s first mention. The base fee is now $17.95, and the per page fee is 5 cents. If I repeated this experiment today, the total cost would be $33.91.

The company offers a menu of additional-fee services: if you want a text-to-speech file, a Kindle-ready file, or a backup on disc, you can buy it separately. To provide these additional services, the company maintains backups of the original scans for at least six months. If you’re not keen on the company keeping a backup copy, you might want to check first; Bianchini says that they “usually comply” with archival opt-out requests.

As far as quality goes, you can see for yourself. Below are portions of two pages from the PDF file Blue Leaf sent to me. The book I sent included photos and maps, so I’ve included one of those pages as well. (Although this is in greyscale, color scanning is offered).

Click the images to view full-size.

And here are the results of the OCR process.

You can see that mixed language texts are problematic for Blue Leaf’s OCR software. Bianchini says the software can recognize 186 different languages, but it has problems if you combine them. The usual suspects cause trouble–things like diphthongs and accented vowels. Bianchini says that they’re looking into improvements to the OCR engine, but for now you can expect good results with single-language texts, and not so good results with the random foreign word or character.

Skewing remains a problem, although this certainly isn’t unique to Blue Leaf. I found one page within the file that was unreadable because it was so distorted, so I contacted customer service and asked them to investigate. I was concerned that I’d have to send the book back for re-scanning, but they were able to correct the problematic page using their archival copy and return a corrected file in less than 24 hours.

Before going this route you should be aware of two other things:

And finally, if you’re an author with out of print books that you want to convert into a print on demand template, Blue Leaf offers a “publisher ready” service for $16. That gets you a formatted and cleaned up PDF file with standardized margins, embedded fonts, and other adjustments required by POD services like Lulu.com. However, it won’t correct “processing artifacts such as page skew,” notes Bianchini. I didn’t test the service.

Blue Leaf Book Scanning

This review first appeared on Teleread.org.

(Photo: UnfoldedOrigami)

The average time spent reading in the U.S. is 7.1 hours a week, says L.E.K. Ereader owners, however, average nearly 2 1/2 times that at 18.2 hours per week. Over a third of those extra books are considered “incremental,” meaning they wouldn’t have been read otherwise.

The study compares media consumption across all content channels, including TV (still the king), movies, music, and Internet. But the big news of the study is just how voracious ereader owners seem to be. Why? It seems to come down to these three benefits:

• Affordability – Ebooks are cheaper than printed books, and most people are on restricted budgets in this economy. One of the big media/marketing angles when the Kindle launched was that it would save the owner money over time. Although that may not be exactly accurate, the current ecosystem for ebooks lets a consumer spend less per book. You can stretch your book budget with an ereader.
   
• Discovery – L.E.K. is guessing at this one, based largely on the fact that many respondents said they felt there was a better selection of ebooks compared to other retail channels. I agree with L.E.K. that what they’re probably describing is the ability for ebook retailers to customize their inventory pages based on your past purchases and likes. I’d probably buy more books at a bookstore if there were a shelf up at the front that had titles hand-picked to appeal to my interests.
   
• Accessibility – If I’m using a Kindle or an iPhone or iPod Touch, I can finish a book at three in the morning and immediately purchase the next in the series, without leaving my bed or sofa. Hell, it’s even easier than ordering a movie through my Xbox or cable box. Here’s a real world example: two weeks ago, I was reading a preview on the subway on my way to a meeting, and I bought the book as I came up to street level and was walking down the sidewalk. It was a real purchase for the publisher, but practically an afterthought for me as far as fitting “shopping” into that day’s busy schedule.
   

“Hidden Opportunities” [L.E.K. Consulting via MobileRead]

(Photo: unfoldedorigami)

I attended a Google Book Search settlement workshop yesterday hosted by the National Writer’s Union (NWU), the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The workshop’s panel included representatives of those organizations as well as an agent, a professor who has been studying the issue, and the executive director of the Authors Guild, which is one of the primary parties involved in the settlement. Here are the main themes from the event.

“A settlement isn’t the right way to settle this.”

New York Law School Associate Professor James Grimmelmann, who remained a largely non-partisan outside observer (although he has stated he thinks the settlement should be approved, with modifications), pointed out that a class-action lawsuit isn’t the right way to determine an issue like fair use under copyright law. It needs to be addressed by the government and not through private negotiations, he said, because it has huge societal implications.

Grimmelmann also pointed out that if the settlement goes through, it’s likely Google will emerge with a huge market advantage over any potential competitors, which may negatively impact any healthy competition in the marketplace.

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild and a lawyer, argued that the risk of losing the lawsuit was too great: if the courts found Google’s scanning to fall under fair use–as Grimmelman and at least one other legal expert think it could–then others would copy Google’s scanning project. “In our view,” he told the hostile crowd, “It would be catastropic.”

Grimmelman responded that the proposed settlement wasn’t the only valid solution, and that there could have been other paths to a compromise.

“The settlement is overreaching, and probably untenable.”

Lynn Chu, an attorney, author, and book agent, was the most vocal opponent of the settlement, calling it an “outrageously bad deal as a financial matter” for writers and a “typical entertainment industry scam.” At one point she implied that the Authors Guild had been misled by incompetent legal counsel, which not surprisingly seemed to anger Aiken.

Chu pointed out that the business model proposed by the settlement has nothing to do with the original lawsuit, which was solely about fair use. “You glued a business contract to a waiver,” she told Aiken, and accused the Authors Guild of appointing itself as an agent to the world’s authors.

She also criticized the proposed Book Rights Registry, which is sort of an ASCAP for authors appearing in Google Book Search, noting that it would help Google shift costs over to authors by forcing authors to take care of administrative and publishing tasks on their own dime.

“[The settlement] probably won’t survive an appeal,” she told the crowd, a sentiment that Grimmelmann seemed to agree with. Still, she cautioned, “There’s no reason to be apathetic.”

“The settlement isn’t really author-friendly at its core.”

Edward Hasbrouck of the NWU pointed out a worst-case scenario that could happen to an author under the terms of the settlement: You have a book included in the database, but your ex-publisher claims that because it has authorized a print-on-demand version of the book it still owns the rights, so you and the publisher agree to binding arbitration and you lose. Since the arbitration is legally enforceable, you will have permanently lost your claim of ownership over the digital copy in Google’s database.

Chu noted that Google reserves the right to audit the Book Rights Registry, but that the favor isn’t returned because Google claims trade secrets will be compromised. She also noted that authors can make their own deals with Google and don’t need to rely on the settlement.

Note: the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America hosted an online panel discussion this morning. You can read through it at http://sfwa.org/online-google-settlement-panel/.

(Photo: Robert Couse-Baker)

A lot of authors are having trouble deciding whether the settlement is good or bad for them, probably because it’s a little of both when you get right down to it. I tend to side with Google, but then, I tend to think that making every. single. thing. in. the. world. searchable is a Good Thing and should be done, and I have no faith it will happen in the next 20 years without a for-profit corporation getting involved. (And believe me, I am no sycophant of big business.)
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