Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
I find this very hard to believe.
In fact, I can't believe it without hard numbers, it just doesn't make sense.
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I know one editor at a major house who reckoned manufacturing, warehousing,
and distribution costs at about
10% of the budget of the average book his house published. That struck me as low, and a friend who is a writer and was talking to
publishers instead of editors placed the figure at perhaps 20%. (You can see the thread in her blog here:
http://kriswrites.com/2010/08/12/the.../#comment-1474
Email on a list I'm on inhabited mostly by publishing folks got the following posted a couple of years ago from someone in a position to know the costs::
Quote:
The unit manufacturing cost (paper, print, and bind) of a dead tree edition is as follows:
mass market: $.50 - $1.
trade paper: $1-2
hardcover: $2-$4.
These are "typical" numbers at a medium-to-large trade publisher. Small presses and ultra-short-run presses (e.g. academic presses) typically have higher unit costs, which might explain why some small presses go the all-ebook route, offering paper only via POD.
Admittedly, there are other savings than just the PPB costs--warehousing, for instance. Still, the costs for making a book are considerable *before* it goes to press, and those costs remain even for an electronic edition. Further, if the business shifts to an ebook-dominated market, the publishers will probably have to spend more on marketing. No one's yet figured out how to make viral marketing work on demand, whereas it's pretty easy to offer co-op dollars to the brick-and-mortar stores to put a book in a big display.
Perhaps publishers could shave a buck or two off the price for an electronic edition. On the other hand, they are likely depending on increased ebook profit margins to help them hold down the price of paper editions. The shorter the print run, the higher the unit cost. There's a point where it ceases to make sense to do a paper edition at all. Until we reach that event horizon, the price of ebooks can't go too much lower than the print price.
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Dennis