10-17-2010, 01:56 PM | #16 | |
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10-17-2010, 03:02 PM | #17 | |||||
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With regard to printing costs, they're not eliminated; they're simply moved. The publisher's no longer paying them, now it's the retailer. There's no cost savings here, if anything it's an increase because any POD system has a much higher cost per copy than offset printing. Meanwhile, the reader is either paying more or somebody else is getting paid less - either the bookstore, publisher, or author. Remember, costs are higher in this model, and if the line's held on price, the person most likely to eat those increased costs is the author. Quote:
If you go by Lulu and their cost calculator a 250 page standard size paperback (and that's 250 sheets so 500 pages for the reader) costs $8.00 to manufacture. They're probably the biggest POD house out there at the moment, so any other POD system's going to have comparable costs - if not higher. That's $0.01 per copy more to manufacture a book by POD than the cover price of most of the mass market paperbacks I've bought recently; and most of the paperbacks I've bought lately have been longer, some of them much longer, so they would have cost even more to produce by POD. Right now a mass-market paperback costs about $0.80 to print - and with an industry average sell-through of about 65% that works out to an effective manufacturing cost of about $1.25 for every copy sold - which is still less than a fifth of the manufacturing cost of POD. That's the killer - yes the system is wasteful - but it's still cheaper than POD. Publishers aren't fighting this idea because it makes sense, or because it would break their monopoly or anything like that. They're against moving to this model because it would cost too much. POD is brilliant for small print runs and specialized books. It's not a replacement for offset printing and the current returns system and won't be until it becomes much cheaper. |
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10-17-2010, 04:49 PM | #18 |
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Actually, 250 pages on Lulu is 125 sheets. The printing cost is per page, not per sheet.
The primary reason I went with Createspace instead of Lulu was that Createspace's cost was lower for the same quality. Lulu offers hardcover and Createspace doesn't, though. |
10-17-2010, 05:01 PM | #19 |
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I'm very sorry to hear about the loss of your friend.
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10-17-2010, 05:02 PM | #20 | |
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10-17-2010, 08:40 PM | #21 | |
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10-18-2010, 07:24 AM | #22 | |
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10-18-2010, 08:49 AM | #23 |
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At my local Borders, the coffee shop area is right beside the magazine aisles and there are plenty of overstuffed chairs so that you can easily sit down with your coffee and read magazines or even books which are next to the magazines. Even the children's reading area is full of seating areas. When my kids were young I'd take them there and we could read for quite a while *but* I always purchased some books to take home. The biggest issue was finding books that weren't shopworn.
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10-18-2010, 09:53 PM | #24 | |
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10-18-2010, 11:16 PM | #25 | |
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Right now, the price to manufacture a POD book is often equal to or greater than the cover price of a comparable book printed on an offset press. This requires higher prices, and traps authors in a self-fulfilling prophecy of lower sales. Once the cost comes down drastically, it will be a viable option - but until then it's not going to be practical except for very niche books. The economics are murder. |
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10-19-2010, 12:43 AM | #26 |
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Don't get me wrong. I agree with what you're saying. In fact, I think we both agree it'll be the way the trend will go.
It'll first start up in places where it's just hard or impractical to have a large selection of books available. People in those situations will be willing to pay more. I imagine in Asia (but not North America), 7-11 will have these machines. I also think there will be an environmental incentive as well seeing as all those packages from Amazon criss-crossing the country and world can't be good. If the computer industry is anything to go by, it'll take a few years, but it'll get there. E-books were booed by pundits all along, yet a few enterprising individuals saw the opportunity. Now it's all anyone can talk about. Like e-books, POD has the potential to take power away from the current publishing conglomerates. |
10-19-2010, 08:21 AM | #27 |
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Lemurion: Believe it or not, there are a bunch of people out there who are figuring out how to do POD runs at half the cost of traditional printing by using some of the same tricks that the big printers use, only amped up in certain areas. I think one of them is looking at getting the "per book" cost of POD down to like $2.50 a copy for a standard 250 page 6x9 novel. My best price for full print runs of no less than 5000 at that size is about $3.
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