A photo appears in a newspaper as an illustration in an article... it's editorial use. The local TV news uses a still photo of a location in a news report... it's editorial use. A photo appears in a book as an illustration... it's editorial use. Conversely, a photo appears in a newspaper as part of an ad... it's commercial use. That's taking it the long way around defining it but I think it might help you understand.

The fees for commercial licensing are traditionally much higher than for editoral use. You need to ask questions about how many copies the author thinks might be sold. An image appearing in a book that will sell 100K copies is obviously worth more money than in a book that will sell only 100. The thing with "ebooks" is that the term can mean a lot of things. It may be a book sold through Amazon with tons of exposure, or the guy might self-publish and sell it through his own website only. There's a big difference in the earning potential of those two. There are a lot of professional and semi-professional photographers self-publishing ebooks these days.

Below are a couple of free online calculators for photo uses. The first one seems the most current with recent trends. Hope they help.


Another Price Photo Calculator


Stock Photo Price Calculator