25% sounds a little high to me. The figure I normally hear is that paper is about 10-15% of the cost of a book (I'm not directly in the publishing industry, but

25% sounds a little high to me. The figure I normally hear is that paper is about 10-15% of the cost of a book (I'm not directly in the publishing industry, but I've been a technical reviewer on several books and have a fair number of friends who are author/editors - mostly in the non-fiction market which is a little different from the fiction world). See http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost... for some vague evidence (The slice taken by marketing in the above seems high from what others have told me. Its also a somewhat simplistic breakdown since it ignores some of the long-term costs from publishers that aren't related to "books" directly. e.g. the advances to authors who never get published, etc. - so the potential publisher profits aren't quite as large as they appear here - there's other overhead outside the printing/distributing/selling books bit) Also see http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-of-physical-book-publishing/ http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-... It's also something Charlie Stross has posted about a fair bit see this collection of posts http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m... TL;DR - people think about book prices being related to cost of producing media. That's like thinking software costs are mostly about the price of printing DVDs or shifting bits. It's mostly about book development costs - not media costs.