4 ms·
Publishers could lower the price of ebooks and still make more than they would on a paperback? Right? Surely printing costs, distribution costs, and retail cos
by sheepmullet 12y ago
Publishers could lower the price of ebooks and still make more than they would on a paperback? Right?
Surely printing costs, distribution costs, and retail costs for a physical book dwarf the listing fee that Amazon et al charge for an ebook?
- ghaff 12y agoActually, if you look at the numbers, the physical costs of printing and distribution are a pretty small portion--maybe $2 or so. And I can publish a POD trade paperback and get the same profit per book by setting the price just a few dollars higher. A lot of people assume that the cost of physical book publishing must be way higher than ebooks but it's really not.
- shabble 12y agohttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-ebooks.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-e... (and the rest of his 'Common misconceptions about publishing'[1] series) covers this idea in quite some detail, and ultimately concludes that the majority of the cost is in the pre-production processes, not the physical book printing. Exactly how ebook pricing relates to any form of sanity is something of another matter. IIRC Amazon, Apple, etc all take something like 30%+ of the sale price, and the retail book industry (after allowing for unsold returns and all the weird accounting jiggery-pokery) operates on quite thin margins. [1] 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...
- sheepmullet 12y agoIt sounds like the actual pre-production process is cheap ($7-20k for a book). After reading his blog a fair bit it seems clear that Amazon is the real winner and that they pocket the savings from switching to ebooks (they take up to 70% of the sale price!).