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Why shouldn't it be cheaper? As distribution has gotten cheaper food, physical goods, software, entertainment, and information have all gotten cheaper. Why shou
by jonhohle 17y ago
Why shouldn't it be cheaper? As distribution has gotten cheaper food, physical goods, software, entertainment, and information have all gotten cheaper. Why should books be exempt?
Looking at the prices, I would also feel Like as an ebook buyer, I'm either subsidizing the price of the physical version, which must cost more than $0.12 to manufacture and ship, or simply being charged a higher margin for the same (and in some cases lower fidelity) content.
- cstross 17y agoNope. The cost of producing an ebook is around 90% of the cost of producing a paper book. This only seems counter-intuitive until you realize that 70% of what you pay for a book is slurped down by the retail distribution channel, 10% goes to the author, 10% goes to the publisher, and 10% goes on production costs. More here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...
- joubert 17y agoNot that I'm disagreeing with you, but a retail distribution channel is necessary for physical goods (the 70% component you mention), unlike electronic products, which can be distributed at close to zero.
- protomyth 17y agoThe web does have costs and they are not "close to zero". People cost money either in salary or contracting.
- joubert 17y agoMaybe were not talking about the same aspects of book distribution, but I would estimate physical distribution (inventory keeping, shipping) to cost much more than electronic distribution (uoloading to an ebook store).
- protomyth 17y agoI'm not saying it is the same cost, I just have this problem with the people continually saying zero or almost zero cost. It isn't. There are different sets of costs (storage, bandwidth, server, etc.), but it still costs.
- qq66 17y agoIt's more instructive to think of the Web distribution channel as having close to zero MARGINAL costs. If you have an Amazon-scale infrastructure, and you increase your physical book shipments by 10%, you need to cut down 10% more trees, hire close to 10% more guys in the warehouse, pay 10% more to UPS, etc. For e-books, increasing shipments 10% increases the costs of the salary, infrastructure, etc. probably less than 0.1%.
- cstross 17y agoThe publishers' dilemma is that they can't sell direct to the public without screwing the existing retailers and distributors, who can be expected to retalliate (see also: Amazon blacklisting Macmillan). As ebook revenues are currently around 1% of all publishing revenues, this would be Extremely Unwise (in business terms) to the publishers. As ebooks become more important, expect to see a lot of friction between publishers and the current dead-tree retail supply chain, not to mention their attempts to stay relevant (B&N's Nook, Amazon's Kindle). But it's not really going to get serious for another couple of years.
- jm4 17y agoClose to zero? Tell that to the people that paid to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary to distribute all those Kindle books. A team of people to maintain an online storefront, the manpower required to scan all those books, servers, bandwidth, a wireless deal to distribute those books, etc... It could be less than shipping dead trees all over the place, but it's nowhere near zero.