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Workflow in the House

As I’ve mentioned in the past, many publishers have tended to treat e-books as shovelware, and (unsurprisingly) the hasty conversion of files intended for print into e-book editions — with little or no consideration for the medium — has meant the quality of e-books has suffered.

Needless to say, poor quality e-books are becoming something of an embarrassment for publishers trying to convince readers to pay a premium for downloads (as Kassia Kroszer recently pointed out in Publishing Perspectives: it is hard to justify higher e-book prices when the product simply isn’t up to scratch), and clearly it’s an issue publishers need to address sooner rather than later if they want win this argument.

The problem of substandard e-books partially stems from the fact that many publishers currently lack the means and expertise (and, to some extent, the will) to produce high quality e-book editions themselves. Their workflow and production process are set up for print, so the quickest way to create e-book files has been to outsource the job to third parties, inevitably with very little quality control.

This was the subject of an interesting (if somewhat snarky) post this week by Pablo Defendini, producer and blogger at Tor.com, at The New Sleekness:

[B]ig publishers outsource a large part of these services… They’ve found that cutting out expensive production departments and hiring out the services of middlepeople, who also handle distribution and sometimes even retail fulfillment, saves on people power (read: health insurance and pensions), hassle, and extra load on their IT departments. Well, guess what one of the cardinal rules of the digital revolution is: digital production eliminates the need for most middlepeople. Bring this all back in-house, make it a lean operation. Settle on nothing less than a standards-compliant workflow, but please, build it from the ground up, as opposed to tacking it onto your existing production setup as an afterthought.

Pablo is picking a crowd-pleasing soft target in the “big publishers” — many (most even?) small and medium size publishers (the notable exception being O’Reilly of course) are also outsourcing their e-book production — but he does make some really important points about the need to learn new skills, rethink workflow and (ideally) bring e-book production in-house.

The comments are also worth reading but, — if like me — you are just beginning to get your head around this stuff, definitely work your way through the Digital Book World presentation by Liza Daly, of Threepress Consulting, referenced in the article:

25 Comments

  1. Superb post Mr. Dan. E-books are definitely the future and the future is now. The sooner we address electronic covers the sooner we can raise the e-cover bar way, way up much closer to print. Great post & video.

  2. Dan

    Thanks Hollis. I’m hoping to have a follow-up chat with Pablo on the blog sometime soon.

  3. […] eBooks Shoddy eBooksLooks like publishers are getting dinged for outsourcing ebooks to third-parties who do shoddy jobs: Needless to say, poor quality e-books […]

  4. […] that happened yesterday with my post about production, which was taken in some quarters as a damning indictment of publishers, rather than a post about […]

  5. JohnM

    Take a look at http://www.baen.com No outsourcing there. Quality EBooks in six formats with no DRM. Prices from four to fifteen dollars (for EARCS), almost all five or six. Scores of complete books in the Free Library. This is the Future, NOW.

    • Dan

      Thanks for comment John. Is this just reader enthusiasm for Baen or do you have some professional connection to them? Just curious… Anyway, interesting that Baen is a genre publisher — and sci-fi at that — an area where e-books seem to be most successful. What lessons are there for general trade publishers?

  6. JohnM

    Just a fan who has been reading their ebooks since 1999. When they used to be four bucks. But now I can get the EARCS of my favorite authors many months before publication. Or save money and wait. The books are published one half three months prior to dead tree, three quarters two month prior and the complete book a month prior to dead tree shipment. Also several other publishers are serviced and combo deals abound. They are the best example of what can be done!

    • Dan

      Thanks John. Really appreciate your comments — Baen obviously has some devoted fans. :-)

  7. Geoffrey Kidd

    I have to (sadly) agree with some of the comments about eBook quality. I’ve bought two eBooks from B&N, Heinlein’s “Space Cadet” and Turtledove’s “How Few Remain,” and both had typos/scan errors in them that showed up in a casual inspection. Ghu alone knows how many other errata there are in these, and yet I buy eBooks instead of pirating them because the quality is supposed to be *better*!

    It’s also been established that a large chunk of Amazon’s Kindle books are unproofed OCR with a light dusting of page images so they look good in the parts where the OCR software upchucked. IMHO, that constitutes fraud, since the text is clearly NOT isomorphic with the treeware edition.

    Publishers who want to survive had better get over their contempt for eBooks before they lose readership to publishers like Baen, where quality is still honored.

    • Dan

      Thanks for your comment Geoffrey. I think we are agreement that most publishers (Baen perhaps being one of the exceptions) need to improve the quality of e-books. But a couple of observations… I agree that quality should be an incentive to buy e-books rather than pirate them (and that publishers need to realise this ASAP). There are, however, other reasons to not pirate. Besides it being illegal, it quite possibly screws the author… I mean, I’ve seen some research that suggests a small amount of piracy is actually good for sales, but is endemic piracy good for a creative culture? I’m not so sure… I don’t know whether piracy and/or a culture of “free” can sustain the kind of good writing we want to read…

      Also, I don’t think publishers are showing “contempt” for e-books as you put it. E-books are small part of most publishers business (the figure I have heard repeated is less than 5%) and so they have overwhelmingly focused on print because it makes business sense to do so. Most realise, of course, that e-books are a growing part of their business, but this has happened in the last two years (possibly less), and so they have been rapidly trying to make up for lost time. Unfortunately, their haste (and lack of in-house skill) is leading to the kind of quality problems we’ve been discussing. I’m not excusing the poor-quality, I’m just saying that is a result of something other than contempt… (The idea publishers hate e-books is a myth in my experience…)

      I think the situation is probably different for Baen. Obviously they are forward thinking (and full credit to them), but genre fiction (and this is probably doubly true for SF) is one area where e-books have actually seen real success (and a lot of piracy) and so I expect it made sense for them to pursue e-books earlier than most. It doesn’t surprise me that they are ahead of the game…

      Anyway, did you see my follow-up post on workflow? I talk about some of the problems publishers are facing transitioning from a print world to print-and-digital world there. Ultimately I think we will begin to see better e-book quality in future, but I guess the question is will it be soon enough?

      Thanks again.

  8. Geoffrey Kidd

    I see I expressed myself poorly in my comment. I do not, by very strong preference, buy eBooks instead of pirating them solely because the quality is supposed to be better because the publisher’s imprimatur is on the eBook. As I have remarked elsewhere (and put my money where my mouth is), I’m very big on publishers and authors eating hot food and sleeping indoors. Charles Stross has a How Books Are Made post today on his blog that goes into the mechanics of just how much work besides writing goes into a book. And yes, I agree, all of it needs to be paid for.

    But I do stand by my right to expect that, if I’m buying an eBook with the publisher’s brand on it, the book will be word-for-word isomorphic with the printed text.

    As for eBooks being a small part of the market, that’s quite true, although the publishers themselves have played no small part in trying to squash the inevitable growth of books-as-bits, with their “limited number of formats” releases and DRM. Nothing kills sales faster than having to ask “Mother May I?” every time you change hardware, or knowing that, if the publisher changes their mind, your bought-with-your-hard-earned-money books can be taken away from you with the flip of a switch. (cf. Amazon 1984 incident).

    I can cite an example for the above paragraph: Yesterday I learned about David Louis Edelman’s “Jump 225” trilogy via John Scalzi’s blog. I checked. The eBook is only available on the abomination-unto-the-Lord Kindle. I don’t have either $260 to spare for the thing, nor any interest in carrying around another damned gadget to go with my phone and Palm. But that’s what the publisher chose, and locked me out of their market. I’m sure they’ll wake up eventually, but right now it’s damned frustrating for a bibliophage such as myself.

    • Dan

      Thanks for the clarification and for your insight Geoffrey.

      Sorry if I sounded snippy about the piracy — it’s just I’ve seen some comments recently suggesting that piracy is not only OK, but almost a moral imperative, which kind of gets my back up. I think it’s important to make sure creative people eat! But I agree 100% that if you buy something from a publisher you have a right to expect a certain quality and it really isn’t acceptable for publishers to expect you to pay for something which substandard.

      Re: Amazon and 1984. Yes, it is an example of how e-books can be deleted without permission and, yes, it was very ugly, but the publisher did not change their mind — Amazon should not have sold that edition in the first place because the publisher did not hold the US copyright. The publisher should have known better and Amazon should have checked. Neither of which excuses Amazon’s rash decision to delete the books, but it isn’t really an example of publishers trying to squash e-books… What it really illustrates is why getting rid of DRM is not straightforward — Orwell is out of copyright in some countries but not others, and so how do you handle that? What do you do if a new book has multiple rights-holders? I think this will be less of an issue in future, but it is hard to untangle right now…

      Anyway, I don’t really think publishers have been actively been trying to “squash” e-books (I think that supposes a grand conspiracy that just isn’t there), but they have been dragging their heels and again it probably just comes back to the size of the market (which is, admittedly, a bit of a chicken and egg situation) and the complexity of trying to make print fit into a digital world…. And I’m not sure you can entirely blame them for issues over formats and devices — there is still not an industry standard, retailers want different things and it’s confusing. Everyone is best-guessing or doing what they CAN do rather than SHOULD do… The Kindle is currently dominant, but then there a lots of reasons why publishers don’t want to commit themselves to that format… Perhaps something Kobo’s device relatively device-agnostic cloud model is the alternative? Interesting times…

  9. Dan,
    My $.02 (does anyone know anything that $.02 will buy any more?).

    I’m another Baen fan, but I’m a fan of electronic publishing generally, as well, both books and music. (I’ve been a computer geek since my childhood in the ’60s, so my experience is probably not typical.)

    My family owns a Kindle (and three laptops), which we bought for my partly bedridden wife last year, and we’ve increasingly moved to buying most of our new titles on the Kindle, just because of the convenience — push a button and read the book, no searching through the stacks downstairs — and the space savings (the bookshelves are rather half-past full). This has saved us a moderate bit of space in the house – we own fifty-three titles on the Kindle at the moment (not counting the hundred-fifty or so Baen ebooks which I’ve acquired over the years), some ten or fifteen of them free or deeply discounted loss leaders for series. We also have a basement library of some one or two thousand hardback and paperback editions.

    What we have _not_ done is (a) pirated any books; (b) paid full hardcover price for ebooks. (a) because, really, we prefer supporting the authors and editors; (b) because it’s clear that the unit cost to produce an ebook should be significantly less than hardcopy, just because of foregoing the paper and print-shop components in favor of zero-inventory server downloads.

    We’re seeing increasing frequency of (1) delayed releases of new books from favorite authors such as Kim Harrison — which we don’t like but will put up with for the price advantage it usually provides; and (2) many attempts to charge full hardcover price for ebooks, which usually causes us to _not buy the book at all_ — it’s not like there’s a shortage of really good reading material out there!

    Finally, other than the Kindle we have _not_ bought DRM-encrypted books. Kindle’s “ecology” is convenient enough that we do not consider it restrictive — we can read the book on a Kindle app in any of the devices in the house; but this does not appear to be the case with the Sony or B&N DRM formats. When those become equally convenient, with competitive pricing, we will no doubt expand our buying; but at present we buy ebooks from two places only (Baen and Amazon).

    @@@

    • Dan

      Thanks Phil. Well, I think publishers are beginning to realise the price has to come down, but I think they want to do on their own terms not Amazon’s… And, as I say, DRM is complicated. I think the cloud idea provides a possible answer, but that has other issues… [NB: I made the edit your comment!]

  10. Geoffrey Kidd

    I don’t think there’s some “grand conspiracy” among publishers to squash eBooks. The situation seems to boil down to an attitude of “OMG! Cheap eBooks will cannibalize our current business! Maybe if we ignore them they’ll go away?”

    What they’ve forgotten is a saying about adaptation to the future that I ran across recently: “If you don’t cannibalize your current business for the sake of your future business, somebody else will.”

    • Dan

      Geoffrey: Yes there is definitely a bit of that. But I think it is changing… S L O W L Y ! :-)

  11. @Geoffrey: Nicholas Negroponte, in “The Media Lab” (A history of MIT’s famous digital-technology experimentation project), was quoted as saying, “Once a new technology rolls over you, you’re either part of the steamroller or part of the road.”

  12. John Biltz

    I’m another Baen reader. I generally buy e-book over paper. The thing about the Baen model is it is customer friendly. If there is a series then quite often the first book of the series is in the free library. Think about how you read and find books. A friend with similar tastes reads the book and says this is great. He doesn’t then tell you to go out and buy it he lends it to you. Then you may well buy it yourself or start buying the author. You can’t do that with DRM. Its not book friendly. Yes some are going to get pirated, so do books, its called used book stores. IMO the publishers are so worried about theft they are killing their markets. Books are not movies or music. The dynamic is different. Think about how many books you now buy today because when you were young you went to the library and read books for free. Yes, books are going to get pirated that does not mean they would have ever been bought by the pirate.
    Eric Flint says it best here. http://www.baen.com/library/

    • Dan

      Hi John. Just curious: where are all you Baen fans coming from??? It’s nice, but… ?

      Anyway, I think genre lends itself to the model you discuss because there are series or authors that readers follow avidly. I don’t know how that works for more stand-alone trade books? It’s interesting though. I know Harlequin (the romance publisher) are doing some similar things to Baen.

      I agree that the dynamic is different from movies and music, but I actually think publishers are less scared about theft than those industries — we do have more of a culture of lending and giving. That said, maybe we are more worried about rights? A traditional way for publishers (particularly small publishers) to make money has been to sell foreign rights — so if you publish in Canada, you might sell rights to a publisher in the US or the UK etc — because it’s a better bet than trying to distribute the book abroad yourself. Digital has the potential to change this equation — it might begin to make more sense for publishers to sell their own books internationally, but for the meantime it’s a bit of a minefield. Few old contracts have references to e-books so who has the rights (and to where)?

      (PS I actually find the Baen site unreadable. Their e-books might be great, but they really need to do something about their webdesign!).

  13. Dan,
    1) You’ve been linked to at “Baen’s Bar” (http://bar.baen.com/), a multitopic bulletin board, in the “Toni’s [Weisskopf, the publisher] Table” forum.

    2) Agree with you about the Webscriptions surfing. If you don’t go there with a pretty good idea of what you want to buy, it’s tough to get around. Baen Free Library (http://www.baen.com/library) is a bit easier to follow, and includes whole-book authorial loss leaders (hit “The Books” link on the leftside menu bar). I don’t go into Webscriptions unless I am in search of a specific title (I follow various fora on the Bar, and there is much discussion of new Baen titles and authors).

    • Dan

      Thanks Phil. Don’t get me wrong — glad to have you all here and you all have a perspective different to mine which is interesting! — I was just curious. Thanks again.

  14. Leon Jester

    On the pricing thing: Publishers sell paperbacks at ~$8.00 list. There’s no reason to sell electronic versions for more — and most readers I know simply will not pay it, unless there is some special reason (ARC, for instance, released well ahead of print date).

    Tor’s debacle with Dave Weber’s Off Armageddon Reef is an excellent example: The electronic book was marketed at ~$18 when B&N had it in hardcover for a discounted price of ~$16.50.

    Jim Baen set the standard, the rest of the publishers need to get in touch with the real world.

    • Dan

      Leon: Thanks for your comment. I don’t really want to open up the whole pricing debate because it’s a complicated balancing act and it’s a bit off-topic (and I’m not sure where you’re pulling the $8 figure from), but suffice to say I think there is a growing acceptance within publishing that e-book prices have to come down (just as quality has to come up) and — assuming certain retailers are willing to negotiate in good faith — we will see prices more comparable with (and possibly less than) paperbacks in the near future. Whether we get those lower-cost e-books at the same time as newly released hardcovers may be a different story however…

      Also, as I’ve been trying to make clear throughout this discussion, most general trade publishers are in touch with the real world — they have to make tough decisions every day and e-book sales are a tiny part of their business. Until very very recently the “real world” has been telling them to concentrate on print. That has not been the case for publishers in some specific areas — genre fiction (science fiction, romance etc) and computer manuals for example have seen greater growth in e-books (and a greater threat from piracy) and, so their “real world” has looked different. With this in mind, I don’t think it is surprising that publishers like Baen, Harlequin, and O’Reilly are ahead of the game.

      Thanks again.

  15. I published The Last King’s Amulet and Prison of Power with smashwords and have to admit that the covers are far less attractive than I would like to see, but I am a writer not an artist and I am making sales and receiving fan mail. As soon as it is practical I will upload more attractive artwork. It matters, but good work that readers enjoy and want to see more of matters more.

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