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The economics on making an ebook are roughly the same as a print book. The marginal cost of production of a cheap paperback is marginal, the upfront cost is la
by com2kid 9mo ago
The economics on making an ebook are roughly the same as a print book.
The marginal cost of production of a cheap paperback is marginal, the upfront cost is large.
The few pennies that are saved with digital distribution are not a huge game changer regarding the finances of publishing.
- Kon5ole 9mo agoI assume you are speaking as a publisher and considering costs of marketing, editors, lawyers and such? Otherwise printing and distributing 1000 copies of a book is surely vastly more expensive compared to having 1000 downloads of an epub file.
- com2kid 9mo agoAuthors and publishers have written on this topic extensively. Blog posts about it periodically gets posted to HN. Most of the cost to publish a book is upfront. Editing, laying, cover art, diagrams, etc. It costs less than $2 to print a book in bulk quantities. Margins suck. That is why publishers go out of business all the time. Margins aren't any better on ebooks. It costs money to maintain a digital store front. For an example of the costs of digital distribution in another field, look at Good Old Games. They are a digital distribution platform and they barely break even / turn a profit. (A bit more complicated since they also do some of the porting work) Digital distribution has super low per unit costs but huge upfront costs.
- m0llusk 9mo agoIf that were really true then the practice of taking cuts from the cost of copies to pay everyone involved would still be working, but it isn't. And there appear to be differences between media, for example daily papers are different from novels are different from songs are different from albums and so on.
- com2kid 9mo agoNewspapers always made their money from commercial and classified ads. Craigslist killed journalism decades ago, LinkedIn and Facebook Marketplace are the modern successors to CL. Google adwords finished the job. Newspapers subscription prices only ever covered a small % of the overall costs. Spotify is a complicated racket, there are some very good video essays exploring who is making money off of Spotify (it isn't Spotify and it isn't the artists!), a but the rabbit hole there goes deep.