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By David Rothman

image Think that eBabel isn’t a major burden on the publishing industry? Then check out Cheaper e-books will kill us, says publisher, Alex’s new post in MobileRead.

"The distribution of e-books on download servers is only half the story," he quotes Michael Justus, CEO of a German publisher, whom the BuchMart newspaper interviewed. "In particular for bigger publishers, it requires substantial handwork to process the text and its meta data, to work on the necessary contracts and contract amendments, to analyze download sales, affiliate fees, etc. It requires a technical infrastructure and perhaps even additional full-time staffers."

Major cost-bloater

Exactly! Coping with eBabel—all those clashing e-formats!—isn’t the only cost-bloater Justus mentions. But it’s a major one at the production level, as I’ve observed first-hand in arguing for ePubWriter, at least for smaller houses. One way to help slash production costs is to try to standardize as much as possible on one format to send to distributors. That’s exactly what Hachette USA has done, with a focus on starting out with XML, on which ePub is based. At the retailer end, remember that eBabel means that stores must carry many more items in their inventories. So the costs are not just production-related at the publishers’ end.

The DRM angle: Yes, DRM drives up publishers’ costs, too, either directly or indirectly. Houses can just jack up the prices of books. But then they’ll sell fewer of them. Strategies such as social DRM—not the usual DRM, but rather embedding purchasers’ names into their books to discourage piracy—would significantly reduce the technical complexities. Traditional proprietary DRM is one of the worst contributors to eBabel. Adobe-DRMed ePub, for example, is unreadable in Stanza, which works with eReader-related DRM.

The consumer angle:Justus, as you can guess, is passionately arguing against e-books priced much cheaper than p-books. I disagree. It’s a matter of making the industry far more efficient and jacking up volume. As for e-books killing off p-book sales of the same titles, I’d side with Alex—and Jeff Bezos. It isn’t going to happen immediately. E-books aren’t that popular right now.

Long term, of course, most titles will be appearing only in E—perhaps mixed with POD. All the more reason both to distribute e-books to resellers in ePub and sell them to consumers that way.

The Amazon angle: Jeff Bezos should worry less about market share and more about increasing the number of e-book titles available for the Kindle and other machines. Publishers are counting on sales beyond Jeff’s little Kindle world—they can’t make money off Kindle books alone. And eBabel’s costs will get in their way. Sounds counter-intuitive, but it isn’t. By advocating standards, Jeff will help grow his bottom line and speed the transition to E.

 
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