电子书不是天上掉下来

    每当我撰文论述电子书业务时——尤其是在美国司法部（the Justice Department）对苹果公司（Apple）及五家图书出版商提出反垄断诉讼的背景情况下，总会有人留言称，电子书定价过高，因为销售电子书的出版商其实并不用承担纸质图书印刷和发行通常所需要支付的任何费用。

    当然，电子书不会凭空从石头缝里蹦出来，但我从来没有看到过哪篇文章合理地阐述过出版一本电子书的实际成本。因此，我很高兴地在最新一期的《纽约客》杂志（the New Yorker）上发现，肯•奥莱塔写了一篇精辟的文章——《纸质追踪》（Paper Trail），对电子书业务进行了阐述。其中有一段是这样写的：

    “电子书的生产成本比纸质书便宜，每本电子书在生产成本上大约可以便宜20％，因为电子书不需要纸张、印刷、运输、仓储等成本，而且也消除了未售出书册的退还成本——这是一项重要的开支，因为有30％至50％的书最终会退给出版商。但电子书同时也会产生一些额外的费用：维护电脑服务器、监控盗版、对旧书进行数字化处理等。此外，出版商还得付钱给作家和编辑，以及支付租金及管理费用，更不用说精装版图书的印刷、分销和仓储费用，而精装书仍然在出版商的销售中占据绝大部分的份额。”

    电子书相比纸质书在成本上节省的20％似乎并不是很大一笔钱，尤其是考虑到亚马逊（Amazon）一直在以14.99美元到4.99美元的价格销售电子版图书，有时甚至免费提供，而这些图书的精装版售价却高达30美元。

    考虑到大多数图书的成本超过了出版商的销售收入，这种计算就变得更加复杂了。亚马逊的杰夫•贝索斯认为，目前传统出版模式的浪费令人窝火，而他的图书出版模式对于读者（降低了图书价格）及希望成为作家的人（消除了作者和读者之间的“把关人”）都更加高效、更加出色。

    正如奥莱塔指出……

    然而，传统出版模式对作家而言具有一些优势，尤其是在出版商发挥类似风险投资公司的作用时更是如此。作家向某出版商成功推销出版一本书的建议时，他会收到一笔预付版税，它有助于作家负担相应的调查研究及写作的费用。这些预付版税大多从来没有收回过。相当于畅销书养着非畅销书。光景好的年份里，出版商仍能够获得微薄的利润，从而可以让更多的作家通过获得出版商提供的预付版税来冒险启动新的写作项目，也就是说，这种模式养活了一大批职业作家。如果是在一个更高效的环境里，出版商只会付钱给那些能写出畅销书的作家，而很少会付钱给那些写不出畅销书的作家，这对于严肃的读者和作家而言都是一个令人忧虑的情形。据Taleist网站最近进行的一项调查显示，在所有自费出版的作家当中，有半数作家每年从写作中赚取的收入还不到500美元。杨表示，如果出版商没有钱向作家支付预付版税的话，“我们拥有的优质图书数量会更少。它对作家的影响堪称巨大。”

    作为曾在印刷及电子出版业工作过的人，我认为奥莱塔的这篇文章对电子书战争双方提供了一个非常公平的描述。订阅了《纽约客》杂志的读者可以点击此处获得这篇文章的PDF版本。

    翻译：iDo98

    Whenever I write about the e-book business -- especially in the context of the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Apple (AAPL) and five book publishers -- someone in the comment stream invariably suggests that e-books are vastly overpriced because the publishers who sell them incur none of the usual costs of printing and distribution.

    E-books don't write or edit themselves, of course, but I've never seen a good accounting of what it actually costs to publish one. So I was gratified to find, high up in "Paper Trail," Ken Auletta's smart piece about the e-book business in the current issue of the New Yorker, this paragraph:

    "E-books are cheaper to produce, by about twenty per cent per book, because they do away with the cost of paper, printing, shipping, and warehousing. They also eliminate returns of unsold books—a significant expense, since thirty to fifty per cent of books are returned. But they create additional costs: maintaining computer servers, monitoring piracy, digitizing old books. And publishers have to pay authors and editors, as well as rent and administrative overhead, not to mention the costs of printing, distributing, and warehousing bound books, which continue to account for the large majority of their sales.

    Twenty percent doesn't seem like much of a savings, especially considering that Amazon (AMZN) has been selling electronic versions of books that cost $30 in hardback for anywhere from $14.99 to $4.99 to $0.00

    The accounting gets even more complicated when you consider that most books cost publishers more than they earn. Amazon's Jeff Bezos argues that traditional publishing is infuriatingly wasteful, and that his model is far more efficient and better for both readers (by lowering prices) and would-be authors (by eliminating the "gatekeepers" that prevent them from reaching readers).

    As Auletta points out ...

    The traditional model has advantages for authors, though, particularly in publishers' function as venture-capital firms. When an author sells a book proposal to a publisher, he receives an advance against royalties, which helps underwrite research and writing. Most of these advances are never earned back. But books that sell well support the ones that don't. In a good year, this earns the publishers a modest profit, and it allows more authors to take risks in starting new projects—which is to say, it supports a class of professional writers. In a more efficient world, publishers would pay authors who write best-selling books and rarely pay those who don't, an alarming prospect for most serious readers and writers. According to a recent survey by the Web site Taleist, half of all self-published authors make less than five hundred dollars a year from their writing. If publishers don't have the money to pay advances, Young says, "we're going to have fewer books of quality. The impact on authors could be huge."

    As someone who has worked in print and electronic publishing, I thought Auletta's piece offered a pretty even-handed account of both sides of the e-book wars. If you have a subscription to theNew Yorker, it's available as a pdf here.