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Ellora’s Cave and the issue of P books for E authors
May 20, 2007 | 10:50 am
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By David Rothman
Major publishers are starting to experiment with e-book originals. So how much should readers—and writers—care about whether a book is both E and P? That’s one of the timely issues that Tina Engler, founder of Ellora’s Cave, one of the biggest success stories within e-bookdom, discussed with DearAuthor. Go here and here. This is a “must” read for anyone in e-epublishing. While Ellora’s focuses on female-oriented romance titles like the one shown, many of the same ideas would apply to other genres such as science fiction and even to mainstream and nonfiction works.
Related: Earlier TeleBlog mentions of Ellora’s.
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Comments:
The second article illustrates perfectly just how wasteful and stupid the p-book distribution process is:
“Here’s how Borders’ purchasing and return procedure works:”
“Works” is the wrong word, I think… “barely functions” might be better.
Borders orders are shipped to one of their distribution centers. It, in turn, distributes X number of books to each store. The stores that do not sell the books or choose not to carry the books (for whatever reason) return the books, not to the distribution center for redistribution, but to the return center. The return center returns the books to the vendor (the distributor, wholesaler, or publisher). The stores that need additional copies reorder through the distribution center, thus the vendor is receiving returns from the return center while the same books are being reordered by the distribution center. More often than not, the books being returned are not in resellable shape (trade paperback books are returned whole, while mass market is stripped and only covers returned), so those same books cannot be redistributed and more need to be printed.
You pay people to tear off the covers of books and send them back just so you can print some more? And how much does this add to the price of a book? Sheesh!
I have a friend who worked in book sales/distribution some years ago. From what he tells me, this is pretty much the same system that everyone uses.