Shatz pointed out that a major e-book issue for publishers is pricing. “Pricing pressure is probably the biggest concern, especially if [e-books] are merely substitutional.” Consumers expect e-books to be priced lower than print books, because the cost of producing them is lower. With the necessity of having to create multiple formats, however, that cost goes back up again. “Multiple formats are not ideal for us [as publishers] or consumers,” he says. Adoption of the EPUB format should transmit directly to a publisher’s bottom line by making it cheaper to produce e-books, and to price them according to the desires of the market.
Laura Dawson is CEO of Numerical Gurus, LLC, consulting company providing services to the information, librarym and book industries. Dawson has consulted to numerous organizations in these verticals, primarily focusing on solving problems related to metadata, identifiers, Linked Data, semantic web applications, and structured content.