Sci-fi paperbacks

[Cody]

A few of my old favourites have fallen apart, so I've begun replacing them. I was pleasantly surprised to find a thriving online market for second-hand paperbacks. Two arrived this morning, both in very good condition, each costing under £4 (including postage). <flips the finger at Amazon>

On the subject of books, I paid a visit to my local branch library (a place I spent a lot of time in as a kid). Rather sad, to be honest. Where there was once shelves and shelves of sci-fi, now there are just a few. Of the books there, very few were by authors I knew.

[spud42]

same here Cody. there were very few books in my local library. looks like the council has 1 librarys worth of books spread over 7or 8 libraries sites.

i remember going through the local library when i was in highschool and there were a lot of sci-fi books and that was in a small country town of 5000 people..

[Cholmondely]

same here Cody. there were very few books in my local library. looks like the council has 1 librarys worth of books spread over 7or 8 libraries sites.

i remember going through the local library when i was in highschool and there were a lot of sci-fi books and that was in a small country town of 5000 people..

Swiss Cottage Library had the best selection of philosophy books of any council library - they have gotten rid of most of them over the past ten years. North West London has been hit by a spate of closing libraries. In one case the library has become a centre for a religious cult. In another, the local residents have taken it over themselves. When Norwich City library burnt down 15? years ago they had the books freeze-dried to remove the water from the firemen, and then reduced the size of the library by 2/3 or so and again got rid of most of the books.

But we have free books on the internet! We don't need paper books any more! People read books on the internet now - or do they? ...

[Disembodied]

Austerity is the idea that the global financial crash of 2008 was caused by there being too many libraries in Wolverhampton.

[Cody]

Priceless!

[spud42]

funny guy Alexei..

having spent the last 7 months commuting to work on a train with between 1 hr and up to 2 hrs ,depending on the site i was at , i can now say that my purchase of a second hand Kindle paperwhite with a backlight screen was well worth it. However there is a downside to the e-book phenomenon. Every two bit hack who thinks they can write self publishes e-books. These bits of tripe are usually what you get for free ( overpriced at that too ) . Does nobody write a book anymore? why is everything 3 to 20 volume epic ( fails) ?

Now for the biggest mystery .... why is bloody fantasy mixed in with science fiction? where is the science?

Twilight ( or whateverits called) has spurned a mills and boon type explosion in bloody vampire and wherewoolf books written mostly by women all angst and romance...

i may have to join kindle unlimited so i can get something decent to read... without going broke that is.. for some reason they charge almost the same price for an e-book as the published paper ones...

[Cody]

... bloody vampire and wherewoolf books written mostly by women all angst and romance...

Bloody bodice-rippers - literally! Where would Wollyhood be without vampires and zombies?

[Disembodied]

for some reason they charge almost the same price for an e-book as the published paper ones...

That's because the costs for making a (professionally published) ebook are almost the same as for making a physical book. There's the editing (this character is unconvincing; this section is confusing; this part of the story drags; turn the first three chapters into a brief flashback and start the book at chapter 4; this whole chunk seems unnecessary - rewrite it or dump it; etc.). Then there's the copy-editing (this character arrives waving a blaster but apparently doesn't have a weapon during the firefight; this character's name changes from Jerry to Jonny to Johnny; this one is described as "an old woman" here but is still kicking around 50 years later, with no explanation; this character seems to know a crucial piece of information without ever learning it; this is the third time you've used "overweening" in the last five pages; this one long sentence could be two shorter ones; etc.). Then there's the proofreading (easier for ebooks, because it's really just checking spelling/sense; for typeset proofs you've also got to check for widows, orphans, ladders, rivers, dodgy hyphenation etc. as well - although dodgy hyphenation (demon-strate, anal-ysis, leg-end and so on) can still be a problem on e-readers, because software is dumb). There's also cover design, and marketing. All you're really saving on is typesetting (much of it done these days very cheaply, and quite badly, in India), and printing (a lot of it - even for quite short print runs - done in China, and with low unit costs). And of the final price, the bookseller takes a hefty slice (around 50%), and the author needs a cut too. I'm sure that ebooks could be made cheaper, and still (just) turn a profit for the publisher - but probably at the expense of the authors.

I'd estimate that roughly 80-90% of the costs of making a book come before it's printed. Paper is cheap. Like anything, though, books are priced at the maximum that manufacturers think they can get away with. Paperback novels, for some reason - in the UK at least - have to be pitched somewhere under £10, even though you can get hours of enjoyment from them, re-read them, lend them to friends and family, give them to charity, or even sell them to someone else once you're done. And if you keep them dry and away from naked flames they'll probably outlast you. By contrast, a cup of distinctly mediocre coffee in a railway station can easily cost over £3. A single pint of average lager in a pub can set you back nearly £5 (or more - quite a lot more). 20 cigarettes now cost more than - holy crap - £13! For things you set on fire! That make you smell and actively kill you!

[spud42]

on the other hand there are no transport costs, no distribution costs , no warehousing costs . paper may be cheap but that is not the issue . the manuscript never leaves the digital realm except maybe for printed drafts during the editing you mention.

no need for printing and their cost, no need for transporting heavy boxes of books to different countries , no warehousing costs to store the books while waiting for distribution to various cities worldwide, no costs in transporting books to bookshops etc. no additional markup from any of these sources. e.books are a few MB to maybe 100MB so storage on a digital platform isnt expensive the biggest expence is the bandwidth for the downloads. Amazon say that the Authors set the price. I bet the Author gets more from the sale of an ebook than they would from a publishing house with traditional print media.

[Disembodied]

on the other hand there are no transport costs, no distribution costs , no warehousing costs . paper may be cheap but that is not the issue . the manuscript never leaves the digital realm except maybe for printed drafts during the editing you mention.

Editing is done electronically these days; paper proofs have pretty much gone the way of the dodo. I think this is a shame, personally: it's a hell of a lot easier to read a set of properly marked-up physical proofs than it is to plough through a marked-up PDF. Admittedly, the recent ability to import corrections from a PDF into an InDesign document is a boon - but only if the corrections have been marked up properly. Fine if they're from a proofreader, but author corrections? Eech … Transportation, distribution, and warehousing costs are - although not negligible - quite low, and lower still for bigger publishers who have economies of scale. Print costs are cheap, and print runs, for anything other than nailed-on bestsellers, are low (between 1500 and 5000 copies). And nobody ships boxes of books in bulk to different countries; they tend to be locally printed, if that's required: much cheaper to send a PDF than a crate of books. Of course, post-Brexit, there's a lot of extra distribution charges coming in for shipping to countries that are still in the EU. But really, making an ebook is not massively cheaper than making a printed book - and they're still making the printed books as well, because for professionally published titles, far more people buy the print versions than buy ebooks.

Amazon say that the Authors set the price. I bet the Author gets more from the sale of an ebook than they would from a publishing house with traditional print media.

That might be true for self-published books on Amazon, but it's not the case for anything professionally published: the publisher sets the recommended retail price, and Amazon choose what price they'll actually sell it at. What the author gets as a cut will depend on their contract. It might be higher than it is for print, but that'll depend on their agent (who also gets a slice). It's undoubtedly true that some self-published authors make a good, indeed excellent, living selling ebooks on Amazon - but for every one success story, there are hundreds of thousands - even millions - of self-published authors who do well to sell a handful of copies.

Actual, real authors, with actual, real agents, aren't stupid: if they could make more money selling self-published works via Amazon, I'm sure they would. But authors don't write books: they write manuscripts. It's the editors, and copy-editors, and proofreaders - working in close collaboration with their authors - who turn manuscripts into finished, readable books. And it's the publishers' marketing campaigns who help sell those books to readers.

This is from 2013, but I think it still applies - Charles Stross on "Why I don't self-publish".

[Commander_X]

for some reason they charge almost the same price for an e-book as the published paper ones...

[...] Paperback novels, for some reason - in the UK at least - have to be pitched somewhere under £10, even though you can get hours of enjoyment from them, re-read them, lend them to friends and family, give them to charity, or even sell them to someone else once you're done. [...]

Of course there's a solution to both of these problems: Arrrr !

[Disembodied]

Of course there's a solution to both of these problems: Arrrr !

The librarrry?

Seriously, I don't know why people feel the need to pirate books. They're very cheap. And if someone genuinely can't afford to buy a book then they can borrow them - or if they're not in stock, request them - from their local library. Authors get paid, publishers get paid, and libraries do loans of ebooks too. Using a public service is the only way to preserve it. The remorseless privatisation of the common weal depends on running things down to the point where people stop using it; then it can be asset-stripped and flogged off at a knock-down price to some tax-dodger, who then gets to charge us all rent to use the things we used to own.

[Cody]

... this is the third time you've used "overweening" in the last five pages;

<sniggers> Standby with your synonyms!

[Nite Owl]

A few of today's self published authors seem to think that a Thesaurus is a species of Dinosaur.

[hiran]

A few of today's self published authors seem to think that a Thesaurus is a species of Dinosaur.

I tried to turn up brightness on TV. There is a knob labelled 'brightness' but it does not work.