Page Created: 06/07/11. Last Updated: 07/24/11.
DENNIS MCCUNNEY
E-Publishing Links & Articles Cited
Articles:
..........NYCC 2009: Intellectual Property Primer:
http://www.comicmix.com/news/2009/02/12/nycc-2009-intellectual-property-primer/
Links:
..........MobileRead Wiki
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Main_Page
..........The Research Cooperative
http://researchcooperative.org/profile/DennisMcCunney
..........Linked In:
MEETING SUMMARY:
Meeting Date: June 11, 2011.
Meeting Site: Barnes & Noble, Hackensack.
Official Attendance: 16.
Meeting Program: Discussion of Electronic Publishing and Related Technologies.
Notes:
These are some additional matters discussed by Dennis McCunney at the meeting:
Pirating:
Trying to protect works from being pirated is a waste of time and energy. Some people are simply not willing to pay to download material. Someone, somewhere will have posted it illegally for free. Most people are willing to spend modestly to save themselves time and effort. Instead of trying to frustrate the pirates, it is more productive to make it as easy as possible for people to give their money to the creator.
Magazines:
Books more readily lend themselves to electronic publishing than magazines. The format of a book does not change much from publisher to publisher. Magazines, on the other hand, come in all shapes and sizes. They also use a lot more color. Many electronic readers do not display color, and photographs require much more memory than print.
Libraries:
Libraries purchase electronic books, they purchase licences to access these books. The licences expire after a pre determined number of downloads. Libraries use an outside server for this purpose. This server crashed after a recent holiday because of the demand for e-books from people who had received nooks and kindles as gifts. The demand for e-books at libraries far outstrips the supply. Long waits for availability are the norm.
Agency Model:
There was a reference to the Agency Model of pricing e-books. It was not discussed at any length. Basically, under the agency model, the publisher sets the price of the e-book, not Amazon.com. There's a lot more to it than this. Here's a link to a post on the subject by Tor Books editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012168.html.
Publishing Rights:
Traditionally, publishers pay for certain rights, such as First Publication Rights and North American Rights. They may also purchase additional rights for other media and other parts of the world. If they do not purchase those rights, they are the property of the author and his agent who may, in turn, resell those rights to England, Australia, and other countries. When a work is available as an e-book, an overseas buyer can purchase the work with just a click. This can make the resale of rights less valuable, particularly to other English Speaking nations.
There was also a brief reference to how electronic publishing and print-on-demand impact rights reversion due to a work being out-of-print.
Other Contributors:
The program was both a talk and discussion. Among those in the audience who took an active part in the discussion were Philip De Parto, George Galuschak, Jim Goldie, Roy Greenberg and Matthew Morrone. Special thanks to George for providing transportation to the meeting to our speaker and his guest, Kathleen Morrison.
Newsletter Account:
The following account is reprinted with permission from THE STARSHIP EXPRESS Copyright 2011 Philip J De Parto:
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County conducted its General Meeting at Barnes & Noble in Hackensack, New Jersey on Saturday, June 11, 2011. Dennis McCunney led a discussion of trends in electronic publishing for the meeting program.
The Final Frontier discussion was guest moderated by Philip De Parto and included commentary about authors (Eric Flint and K J Taylor), movies (THOR–-two hammers up) and television (MEGA-PIRANHA-–two tentacles down). Our Animation Associates videos are not shown at our summer gatherings but will return in September.
Speaker Dennis McCunney is an Information Technology professional with a keen interest in the interface of technology, publishing and science fiction. He is the New York Area Editor of MobileRead.com which focuses on electronic publishing, and has served as a reporter and commentator on a range of publishing issues. Links to his presence at MobileRead, The
Research Cooperative and elsewhere appear on the June 2011 Meeting Page at www.sfabc.org.
Mr McCunney started his talk by asking audience members which platform they used to read e-books and similar offerings. This led to a discussion of the kindle, the two versions of the nook, and other players in the field. He credited the kindle for having created the market for e-books, but feels that the nook, particularly the color version, is the more versatile device. He is wary about Sony because in the past it has walked away from platforms it had created.
We took a step back from how an e-book is delivered, to how it is created.
Professional electronic publication incurs most of the same costs as traditional print publication. These expenses include paying the editors (acquiring and copy editors), the cover artist and art department, the legal department, pro rata advance money, general corporate overhead and more. Our speaker estimates that only about 20% of an e-book’s production cost can be squeezed out of savings in paper, ink, warehousing and transportation.
Complicating matters is the mish-mash of programs a manuscript encounters once inside the publisher. The manuscript begins its life as a MS Word document, but as it moves from department to department, it is recast into PDF and other formats and then back. Dennis felt that publishers would benefit by creating industry standards to streamline and
simplify both internal and external workflow.
Matters are considerably simpler if you decide to do it yourself. It is dreadfully easy to self-publish badly. All writing consists of the author putting his ego on the line. Self-publishing removes outside editorial, sales and marketing considerations from the equation. This freedom can be a dangerous thing. Our guest cited an unnamed writer who
invested a considerable amount of thought and effort into a hard science fiction novel. Unfortunately, the author had misunderstood a very basic point about physics which made the book a joke to anyone who was knowledgeable about the subject.
This is not to say that self publishing can never be a useful option. On a certain level, all writers are niche writers. Stephen King just happens to have a very large niche. The trick is finding your audience. Mr McCunney mentioned a small press which publishes small, expensive runs of authentic medieval recipes. Baen Books, to some extent, operates more as a niche player than as a multi-media conglomerate. Additional notes will be on this meeting’s page at sfabc.org.