[ExI] commentary by one of ours

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Dec 03, 2011 at 09:48:37AM -0400, Darren Greer wrote:

> Neither have authors. The majority of authors thrive on advances from
> established publishers that our books usually don't earn out. If

Extremely popular authors (say, Stephen King) can just publish
directly online, and word of mouth is absolutely sufficient.

> e-publishing continues to become cheaper and easier, and the established
> dead-tree publishing industry dissolute, then we may be forced to skip the
> middle man and send our books out into the market on a supply and demand
> basis. Advances will be a thing of the past, and our payment will depend
> entirely on how popular our books are and how much money we earn above our
> production costs.

I don't see why you can't contract freelancing editors (or advertisers), 
and run a standard blog with a shopping cart. Charge 1-5 USD/eBook for
mass titles, keep >90% of that, that should do it. 

For speciality you can use embedded watermarking, make users aware of 
that, and charge a bit more.

Scientific publishing which is paid for by taxes should be open access.
Textbooks, especially elementary ones, especially so.

I'm with Springer, we've got books which are >2 kEUR apiece. I just don't
see that as a viable business model. Online versions, subscription-based
are more like it.