Slashdot Mirror
Amazon's eBook Math
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has waged a constant battle with publishers over the price of ebooks. They've now publicly laid out their argument and the business math behind it. "We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000." They argue that capping most ebooks at $9.99 would be better for everyone, with the money split out 35% to the author, 35% to the publisher, and 30% to Amazon.
Author John Scalzi says Amazon's reasoning and assumptions are a bit suspect. He disagrees that "books are interchangeable units of entertainment, each equally as salable as the next, and that pricing is the only thing consumers react to." Scalzi also points out that Amazon asserts itself as the only revenue stream for authors, which is not remotely true. "Amazon's assumptions don't include, for example, that publishers and authors might have a legitimate reason for not wanting the gulf between eBook and physical hardcover pricing to be so large that brick and mortar retailers suffer, narrowing the number of venues into which books can sell. Killing off Amazon's competitors is good for Amazon; there's rather less of an argument that it's good for anyone else."
Author John Scalzi says Amazon's reasoning and assumptions are a bit suspect. He disagrees that "books are interchangeable units of entertainment, each equally as salable as the next, and that pricing is the only thing consumers react to." Scalzi also points out that Amazon asserts itself as the only revenue stream for authors, which is not remotely true. "Amazon's assumptions don't include, for example, that publishers and authors might have a legitimate reason for not wanting the gulf between eBook and physical hardcover pricing to be so large that brick and mortar retailers suffer, narrowing the number of venues into which books can sell. Killing off Amazon's competitors is good for Amazon; there's rather less of an argument that it's good for anyone else."
It would be nice if some of the more expensive textbooks were priced at 9.99. They would probably end up growing the market and making more money.
When I read through Amazon's logic, they wanted to single-handedly re-write the relationship that already exists between the author and the publisher. It is a very thinly veiled move to try and cutout the publisher. While I abhor middlemen, it really struck me as not being Amazon's place to stick their nose into. I have less and less sympathy for Amazon. It is clear they want to be the 800 lb gorilla on too many fronts for my comfort.
A distribution of the expected returns would be more useful than the mean expected return, which can be dominated by a handful of best-selling titles.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Come on. Nobody buys reading material from shops any more. The only bookshops which remain in my city sell junk. But I don't like the idea of buying everything through Amazon either.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Maybe the agreement should be 70% (seems low anyway, BT is free!) for the Author and Publisher and 30% for Amazon (so when it's inevitably decided publishers aren't vital in Ebooks we don't have to go through this again!).
No dude, your books are not so incredible that people will buy them no matter what the price. There may be a few people who are like that, but most aren't. Price matters in entertainment. Turns out, when you make something cheap enough so that people don't need to think about spending the money and even more so they feel like they are getting a "Great deal" they'll spend very freely.
Steam has figured this out with videogames and siphons tons of money out of people's pockets, and has people thank them for doing it. People get drawn in by the "savings" of the sales and spend tons. I should know, I'm one of them. Not only do I have games I haven't played, I have games I haven't installed. I see something that I'm interested in that is a good price and I say "Oh man, I should get that," and I do. If they are more expensive, I think about it more, I wait until I really want a new game, I go and replay something I already enjoy.
Cheaper books will lead to bibliophiles just collecting the things. I know my mom would. You get them cheap enough and she'll drop hundreds a month on stuff she'll never read, just because she wants to have it.
Authors/publishers/developers/etc need to get over this idea of their digital goods being "worth" a certain amount. No, you need to figure out what you need to do to maximize your profits since there is zero per unit cost. Usually, that is going to mean selling cheap, but selling lots.
In particular, I won't pay more for an ebook than the price of a paperback, but I also generally have $10 as the cutoff point - if it's more than that, I'll read something else until the price comes down. I really think ebooks ought to be $5 but that ship has sailed.
They argue that capping most ebooks at $9.99 would be better for everyone, with the money split out 35% to the author, 35% to the publisher, and 30% to Amazon.
That couldn't possibly be true. Authors never get a 50:50 split with a publisher.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Even if you don't have a background in economics, nothing in Amazon's statement should be particularly controversial. Price elasticity isn't something they pulled out of their ass, and the idea that lowering prices could make you more money (by selling even more units) is something the thinking slashdotter should be able to intuit form first principles. "Books aren't perfectly interchangeable units of entertainment" is a nice straw man, but it doesn't change the fact that entertainment spending is highly discretionary, or that his $20 e-book has an entire universe of competing alternatives vying for your attention.
Yes, publishers and middlemen have all kinds of rationalizations for trying to kill e-books, but calling any of them "legitimate" is shilling so hard you could pence a crown.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Why is Scalzi only bringing up hardcover prices when at $9.99 the ebook is HIGHER than the paperback release, which will sell more copies than the hardcover as well. How can he argue that there is "a legitimate reason for not wanting the gulf between eBook and physical hardcover pricing to be so large that brick and mortar retailers suffer" when paperbacks sell for $6.99-$7.99?? If brick and mortar retailers can survive cheap paperbacks, why can't they survive eBooks priced $2-$3 higher? For that matter, I have never heard anyone in the publishing industry who can explain why eBooks should be priced higher than paperbacks.
Even if Amazon's argument is flawed, their attempt to persuade by using reason and presenting facts is nonetheless admirable. As opposed to the feces hurling which accompanies most public disputes these days.
It builds a solid foundation for a researched and reasoned response in opposition. As opposed to picking up the monkey dung and throwing back.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Brick and mortar bookstore doesn't sell books with DRM so you can sell it or donate it at your pleasure?
"there's rather less of an argument that it's good for anyone else." Making $3.50 per book is a fantastic deal for, say a fiction writer.
Its likely best to start a book at 15 and slowly drop it down, just like like every other entertainment medium.... and like they already do by releasing hard backs first. The price thing is true though. I read a lot, I probably buy 2 or 3 books a week and when I am digging for books to buy I give a lot more consideration to cheap books. More expensive books are given much lower priority when I am considering what to buy. I wouldnt even consider a $15 book and a $10 is barely within consideration. $3 is more like it and $6 being a stretch.
I'm sick of paying $16 for eBooks when the hardcover version sells for $12... I'm with Amazon on this one.
In your model, it's beautiful you can get so many people to work for a mere 2% of the total revenue. This includes:
- the editor
- the copy editor
- the proof reader
- the cover/graphic designers
- the photographers
- the layout people
- the marketing people
- the lawyers, if necessary
- management
- the printer
- the accountants
- the customer service (used by stores)
- the IT department
- the building janitors/maintenance
- the delivery people
- the shipping and receiving people
- the store managers
- the store clerks
- the restocking people
- the ISBN fees
- the rent, hydro, etc on the publisher's building
- the rent, hydro, etc on the store's building
- the delivery truck's amortization and fuel expenses.
- the conversion to digital format (and associated fees for software)
- store website and database people
Out of curiosity, just how much do you believe that authors/artists make?
Scalzi whines (and he's a very good whiner) that Amazon is acting out of pure self interest, with any benefit to anyone else being coincidence, but I note that Scalzi, by his own accounting, makes a six figure income from the traditional publishing industry, so by his own logic, every single word out of his mouth (or keyboard) must necessarily be assumed to be for his own pure self interest, with any benefit to anyone else, including us, the readers, being coincidence.
The bottom line is that the entire publishing industry is very, very broken, desperately trying to cling to a centuries old, thoroughly outdated business model. Amazon is the new, disruptive innovation, forcing change whether their competition, or the market, is ready for it or not. That is pretty much the only difference. Both sides are huge, publicly traded companies required by law to care more about profits than anything else, both sides are doing whatever they can to protect their shareholder's interests and CEO's egos. With the technology changes in the last 20 years, the conflict is inevitable. It cannot be avoided. The winner will be whoever is best at creating the new business model, and history says that will very likely be Amazon. For publishers, it's adapt or die.
Thing is, pretty much all that is true of authors, too. They, too, are businessmen who are out to protect their own interests. The professionals - the real professionals, like Scalzi, who make their living off writing - are not about to let the fans' interests get in the way of their mortgage payments. Those who are part of the traditional industry, like Scalzi, will naturally see the logic of their publisher's arguments. The growing handful of those who have made it big self publishing through Amazon will naturally see the logic of Amazon's arguments. And us, the buyers of books, will naturally see whatever propaganda is packed up in the skimpiest bikini with the biggest boobs.
The most profitable part of a book release is the hardcover phase for a new book. The profit margin on hardcovers is higher than on paperbacks, mass market or trade. If you undercut your own prices on the hardcovers with your ebooks, you lose the more profitable sales.
It's an outdated business model, and one that doesn't work with ebooks very well at all, but it's the one that has run the publishing industry for a century and more, and it's not going down without a fight.
People who actually work in the industry, including award winning authors will point out that as much work goes in to turning a manuscript in to a book as goes in to writing the manuscript. That's today, with the crappy level of editing and proofreading.
What you want is no editing, no proofreading, and overall shit quality. You can get, literally, millions of books like that for free all over the internet. Enjoy.
Amazon's pricing argument is one instance of the same general phenomenon that gross expenditures, under some conditions, increase in response to price decreases. The effect has different names in different contexts:
With taxation, people sometimes refer to the Laffer Curve, which for levels of taxation to the right of the peak of the curve, reducing tax rates increases tax revenues.
For technology, Jevons Paradox explains why, as the efficiency of home appliances increases, so does energy consumption.
My grandfather, an economist, had an amusing story about a toll bridge authority attempting to taper down revenues as the bond which funded the bridge was paid off. They lowered the toll price to reduce revenues and revenues shot up as customers responded to the lower toll price by crossing the bridge more frequently. So they lowered the toll price again and revenues shot up further. As I recall the story goes that it worked the third time.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I for one flat refuse to pay more than $9.99 for an ebook and I will never forgive Steve Jobs for causing this mess in the first place.
So in other words, better not to sell the book at all than sell the edition of the book which has a lower profit margin?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Not in my case. I buy 'the book' often because its the only one available on the topic. If its priced too high I have to put it off until the price is reasonable. In some cases that is never. If a book is available as an ebook its even better. I have a Kindle that reads to me while I commute. Obviously I can't read a paper book while driving.
I still want to know why the fuck an eBook with virtually zero cost of goods is near twice the price of an actual paperback with serious manufacturing, storage, and distribution costs.
If eBooks were sold with the same profit margins as paperback they'd probably be about $2. I refuse to pay much more than that for one.
It is a bit of a bother. But, it is not unusual to be able to sell a book for the same, or even more, than you paid for it.
Cut out the useless publisher, and the author gets 70%.
Why do you need a publisher to sell an ebook?
Idunno. Maybe a publisher does have some use. But does an ebook publisher deserve a whopping 30% ?
Also, the big 6 publishing houses have a massively left-leaning bias. They've spent decades now killing the sales numbers of entire genres because the authors were required to toe the line of the latest politically correct movement.
You really had to go there, huh? By the way, Ann Coulter is published by Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House.
And frankly, profit isn't partisan. Companies publish what they think will sell (with exceptions, naturally)
Retail the books at whatever price the publisher wants, but then arrange with publishers to do amazing sales. If they manage to advertise the sales to likely consumers based on product purchasing history (Nico buys fantasy novels at a disproportionate rate to others, advertise this fantasy novel to him) they stand to make a lot of money. For instance yesterday I had been watching some comic con panels that featured some of my favorite authors. One of the other authors (Patrick Rothfuss) on the panel was an author I had been interested in and meaning to read for some time. Yesterday I went to buy the book and to my pleasant surprise it was marked down to only four bucks. I bought it instantly. However if that had happened and it had been advertised to me at any point in the last six months, I would have bought the book on the spot at that point. If they can find a way to make such happy accidents happen regularly, everybody wins.
Books (like movies, video games, etc.) are sold as a reverse auction: the price goes down over time in order to charge different customers different amounts for the same good. Traditionally, this is done by having a book be hardcover only for a while before releasing a paperback; the fact that the hardcover is actually more expensive to produce than the paperback is somewhat of a technicality, the important part is that it costs more. The reasonable way to add ebooks to this model is to simply lower the price of the ebook over time, perhaps even aligned with the paperback release.
Video stores are closing all over the world because of the internet. Newspapers are downsizing, magazines are closing their doors because of the internet. It's another logical step to see book stores downsizing/closing as well. There will probably always be book stores around, but it's going to become a niche market where instead of having a book store in every town you will only have them in major city centres. It's inevitable. Kicking and screaming about it is just wasting oxygen. As for the publisher, you add a table of contents, some proofreading and expect a 30% cut! Word can add a bloody table of contents, pay some underpaid English school teacher to proof read it, get on Deviant art and get some underpaid Art student to do a cover and voila, instant publisher. The only need for a publisher was to upfront the costs of printing the fvcking book! That's gone now, and so should publishers. I have read about authors who eventually became big big names who were continually rejected by publishers because they had their head stuck up their own asses. How many masterpieces are lying rejected and discarded because some publisher did not enjoy the book or actually did not take the time to read it. I don't need some opinionated greedy middle man deciding what is good enough for me to read. Get rid of them.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
This is a classic game theory problem. I'm astonished no one has pointed this out already.
The setup is Amazon vs, conventional publishers. Surely Amazon has done the payoff calculations???
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What's happening Instead is that Amazon is using its marketing clout and its "brand recognition" to carve out a monopoly for itself.
Face it: anyone who can set up a website can sell e-books. You don't need a warehouse, you don't need fulfillment services. You just need a web-server and an e-shop.
You also need customers however, and that's where Amazon's added value is. It has a big catalog of paper books and lots of customers who'll turn to Amazon *first* if they're looking for a book. Any book. And yes, that makes it easier to sell e-books too.
In all other respects Amazon's added value is practically zero here, and it takes a lot of chutzpah to propose to charge 30% of the book price for that.
What Amazon noticed however is that *their* turnover is highly price-elastic and that they're well positioned to make money at high turnover rates. Needless to say that their turnover is an *aggregate* of sales of lots and lots of different titles. That doesn't mean that each separate title has the same price elasticity, or that its profit is maximised by adopting their uniform price.
Amazon simply wishes to grow its business by throttling direct sales and specialised retail channels and would like more or less uniform prices (like any other supermarket).
Nothing wrong with that of course, but it's 100% self-serving.
Since there is near-zero cost of producing the nth unit for sale, even small changes in elasticity are valuable to the entire chain. It may not have been worthwhile for their example if the production of the physical hardcover copy costs $3.25 to produce - the increase in sales would be a wash. With eBooks, though, there are no print runs or disposal costs - there's no reason not to maximize number of copies as long as the gross receipts is maximized.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Well, after subtracting the 3% that goes to Visa/Mastercard, that leaves the retailer, editor, publisher, and website manager a 1% loss to split amongst themselves.
Of course, you could do it like the recording industry and give the authors a big share on paper, and then charge them ridiculous "retail" rates for all those services. But then you'd find out that, at the end of the run, the author is still in the red and receives practically nothing. At least in Amazon's accounting, the author is getting gross points.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Amazon is a disruptive service/business having forced traditional publishing to reluctantly evolve and as a result has itself grown extremely successful. Continuing to look for ways to change and adapt (not just itself but the industry) seems only natural. Although this particular proposal of a pricing model may not be the next great evolution I still believe that it is entirely valid to re-examine the future of publishing models.
Back during the agency model, some eBooks were more expensive than the associated *hardback*. This is obviously absurd. The thing was that if Amazon was paying the publisher the same amount for the eBook as the hardback and was required to mark up the eBook by 43% (so as to give 70% of the gross to the publisher), that was a natural result. Amazon doesn't get a 43% markup on their hardbacks (at least not in the best sellers section).
The problem that small book sellers have isn't that eBooks are priced lower than hardbacks. The problem is that Amazon's markup is so much lower than theirs. Amazon sells books close to the price that small book sellers *pay* (presumably because Amazon buys direct from publishers rather than through third parties like Ingram Micro). Now, for hardbacks and paperbacks, at least the book sellers can offer immediate gratification. But if they are competing with eBooks, they lose that advantage. That's why publishers are trying to make eBooks more expensive than the associated paper books.
This is especially egregious with modern books. The publisher receives a digital copy of the book. They have to do extra work to convert it into a printable form. Yet they act like it is harder to convert their digital copy into one readable by Kindle or an ePub device. And then the book is digitized forever, giving them a steady revenue stream for the ridiculously long copyright period.
The other thing that Scalzi ignores is that publishers can't have legitimate reasons for maintaining the relative prices of paper and digital books. That's illegal. They already lost that case.
Ideally, publishers will realize that they should charge slightly less for a digital copy than a paper copy of a book but pay authors the same either way. That will cover their lower costs on a digital copy (no printing, shipping, or returns costs). The net result should be eBooks that are slightly discounted relative to the paper books sold on the same site.
We don't know what's happening inside the Amazon/Hachette negotiations. There's some evidence that Amazon wasn't previously asking for a digital discount. Their launch price was to pay the same for digital copies as for paper copies. Are they still doing that? Or has Amazon been trying to insist on deeper discounts?
Whenever this topic comes up, we end up discussing what publishers really do.
Every time, someone with some knowledge of how the publishing industry works turns up and explains how there is this long road between the author's draft and the book in your hands, made of editing, copy-editing, typesetting, cover design, marketing and more, and the publisher is the truck driver that sees the draft to the end of that road. That's correct.
But I've come to the conclusion that none of that is the one irreplaceable service publishers perform in the system.
All of the above can, to some extent, and for a fee, be performed just as well by independent contractors. (There are great independent editors out there, and aren't we all glad for that.)
The one important thing publishers do is: they take the loss on books that don't earn out.
Now hear me out.
I know how we, Slashdot readers, tend to think about those things. In our minds, if the book doesn't earn out (that is, it brings in less money than the publisher gave the author as an advance), then it's got to be someone's fault, right? Bad writer, bad publisher. Something.
Wrong.
The thing is, a successful book requires a lot of factors. Great writing doesn't suffice. The public is fickle. Yesterday, supernatural romance sold by the truckload, now it doesn't. GRRM was a great writer for decades before you even heard of him. Harry Potter didn't start hitting it big until three or four books into the series. Word of mouth matters, but only after the readership has exceeded a certain critical mass. And until then... someone has to take the loss.
Because, here's the thing. GRRM, Rowling, they're outliers. Many books -- most books, AFAIK -- don't quite earn out. Many deserve to, but don't, because that's not how the world works.
But they still got written, you still read some of them, you still loved some of them, and that only happened because someone, somewhere, was willing to pay an author to keep writing, and take the risk that the great book in their hands may not earn that money back.
And that, friends, is what publishers really do.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
People who actually work in the industry, including award winning authors will point out that as much work goes in to turning a manuscript in to a book as goes in to writing the manuscript. That's today, with the crappy level of editing and proofreading.
I have no formal training in "copy editing", "proofreading", or any other publishing skill.
Yet, it takes me only about an hour to reformat a book from the crappy HTML that almost all eBooks have into something that fits the ePub standard. Likewise, I have taken community-scanned books with horrific formatting and with a few regular expression search and replace, turned them into correct paragraph-formatted HTML, ready for detail formatting. Again, this only takes a couple of hours.
Proofreading the book does take whatever time it takes (a minute or two per page), though, as even spell- and grammar-checking can't catch much.
Since I'm assuming that current authors write using some kind of computer software, I would suspect that a publishing house would have far less to do in the formatting realm as they would have much better sources than I get to work with. So, unless the book is just broken in some way (characters re-named halfway through, backstory in chapter 1 doesn't match that in chapter 12, etc.), it won't need much in the way of editing, as pretty much every author has their own style and changing that isn't a good thing. eBooks especially have no real limits, so a book with an extra 30,000 words isn't going to cause the publishing run to have to be done with some other physical method, or a smaller font to fit the required page count, etc., so again unless the book is so crappy that it probably shouldn't have been written in the first place, there's really not as much need for "editing" as there used to be.
Pricing ebooks at 15+ is a ripoff and the consumers know it. There is no manufacturing, no distribution, no storage, no over-printing, no loss from damage/theft. It's almost all profit. If you sell a dozen or a million, the costs to "manufacture" and "distribute" all the ebooks sold is just about the same. Unlike physical books the "manufacturing" and "distribution" costs do not increase as quantities rise.
So why not price them to sell more?
Oh, no! We have to protect the old way of doing business! To hell with the readers. To hell with authors getting their books into the hands of more readers. To hell with the future. The past has worked very well, thank you very much.
There are a lot more books than books for entertainment. Idiots don't know this.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
After reading a number of comments, I see that many of them fall into either the "Amazon is evil" or "Publishers are evil" camps. Guess what? Just like politics, it comes down to choosing the lesser evil. Neither one works to serve consumers.
Most Ebooks ARE interchangeable units of entertainment. A few authors and titles stand out, but those are generally of interest only to a niche audience. I buy over 50 Ebooks a year for my Kindle, varying from a highly technical textbook on molecular evolution (free!!!) to a Science Fiction novel by a great author ($7.99).
Let's face it, you are buying a brief reading experience, not a leather-bound pride-of-ownership thing for your smoking room.
Quick, name one publicly right-wing midlist fiction writer currently published by one of the big 6.
Take all the time you want to think about it.
Non-fiction and (especially) celebrity/best-sellers who can write their own contract are treated differently.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
So you can wait for the price drop and not whine when you don't get it the first day. I'm sure Scalzi will be crushed.
Generally, they aren't. Typically, the e-book will be priced around a dollar less than the PB.
The punk assed bitching over the Hugo's this year, both over the original speaker and the hilarity that was Sad Puppies II shows that you're full of shit. There are maybe 4 authors that are obviously right wing and published by the big 6 in fiction.
Formatting the book is a whole lot easier than it used to be, true, but that's only part of what an editor does.
The author is not going to be good at reading for consistency, since the author knows a whole lot more about the fictional world than went into the story (at least, this is my experience writing stuff that isn't really publishable). A casual reader may miss a name change or inconsistent backstory. That doesn't mean that name consistency is unimportant, but rather than a skilled editor will pick up on things that will make the book worse that most people will overlook.
If an editor can help cut 30K words out of a book, the book is almost certainly going to be much better. The file size is irrelevant, but the reader is going to get more story per hour of reading. If a lot of the cutting is excess adjectives and the like, the sentences are going to be easier to read.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Formatting the book is a whole lot easier than it used to be, true, but that's only part of what an editor does.
You'd think that, but I returned an eBook to Amazon after their normal return period when starting about 30% through, paragraphs breaks started being random...sometimes there would be no break in 20 lines of alternating dialog, and sometimes paragraphs would break like they were trying to be wrapped to fit a very narrow line. It also had long runs of italics (no closing tag), random font size changes, and run-together words. It was obvious that nobody had read that book after some idiot formatted it.
Also, many eBooks are apparently not sourced from an electronic copy, but rather scans of the print version, as they often have dozens (or even hundreds) of versions of the section separators (like 3 stars) as images. I can maybe understand one copy of the image, but with Unicode and embedded fonts, you can usually convert those kind of dingbats to text.
Or how about this sample (that happens a lot) of how not to do small caps to intro a chapter. The entire span is set smaller than the main text, then the first character is made bigger, and the rest set in fake small caps (by using all caps and shrinking the font). I've seen even worse examples that result in the first words at about 30% of the main font size. These are straight from Amazon, and that's exactly how it renders on a Kindle.
The author is not going to be good at reading for consistency, since the author knows a whole lot more about the fictional world than went into the story (at least, this is my experience writing stuff that isn't really publishable). A casual reader may miss a name change or inconsistent backstory. That doesn't mean that name consistency is unimportant, but rather than a skilled editor will pick up on things that will make the book worse that most people will overlook.
I can tell you right now that publishers either don't have any skilled editors working for them, or they choose to only assign them to books I don't read.
From #1 best-selling authors to the somewhat obscure, I find errors that anyone who read the book at all would have caught. Gems include sections repeated outright in later chapters (character briefly introduced, then fleshed out, but the "fleshing" used copy/paste starting paragraphs that made little sense in the later context), character name changes, spelling/usage errors (I've seen they're/their/there confusion in far too many books), and no knowledge of the character/author (character says "should of gone" as many people incorrectly do, but is "corrected" by the editor to "should have gone" in some but not all instances).
What I'm basically saying is that if you think a publisher deserves money because they provide editing for the author, much of what is being sent out by the "Big Six" shows that you're wrong.
And none of them got started in the last 15 years or so, they're all established names who sell too many books to justify dumping. You know TOR's editors hate that Card is their biggest selling author, but they can't come up with an excuse to drop him as long as he still sells well.
Anyone newer than that will be with Baen, or one of the smaller or indie imprints.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Because you don't have to rewind?
FWIW, I haven't been noticing stuff like that in what I've been reading, and I'm a pretty good natural proofreader. Perhaps we've been reading books from different sources.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Perhaps it's time to have editors share a byline on the books. "Written by X, Edited/Proofed by Y" The second line can be in smaller print, but it would still have the same effect: If someone is a new author and they pay an established, individual editor/proofreader, more people will be interested in their work because the editor was interested in taking on the job. Sure, there will be ones who take any job and churn out material, which can make this second "by" a good negative indicator as well as a positive. The ones that are known to be picky and have a good track record of picking can help authors get started without having to involve an entire publisher.
It will be a weird symbiosis, as accomplished authors will move to unknown editors in order to pay less, but then those editors become known and in turn find unknown authors they can make more lucrative contracts with... It's not a huge divorce from the current publishing industry, but there will be far more choice and it will be far more decentralized, so it's still a vast improvement without the entire industry becoming print-outs of FanFiction.net.
Likely the "proofing" is more important, because basic editing (typeface, spacing, etc.) can be done by computers.
FWIW, I haven't been noticing stuff like that in what I've been reading, and I'm a pretty good natural proofreader. Perhaps we've been reading books from different sources.
My most recent example of something any editor should have caught is in the new Jeffery Deaver (The Skin Collector).
In it, a book is identified by a scrap of a page, primarily because the hero knew the font was Adobe Myriad, based on the shape of certain letters. Anybody at all familiar with actual print books (like an editor) would know that Myriad would never be used as body text since it is a sans-serif font, and a really good editor would check the claims about the "slanted 'e'" and discover that the font has no appreciable angle to the horizontal strokes.
For repeated character description, look at Command Authority by Tom Clancy, and search for "Midas". We are constantly reminded that this is the code name for a character named "Barry Jankowski", and often when we are reminded, we also get a repeat of something else, like his rank, skill set, former postings, etc.