Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Kaufman
It does seem as if publishers are trying to take advantage of us readers. Did you know the difference in cost between publishing a hardcover and paperback is only 25-cents? What have we been paying for all these years??
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I believe that's an exaggeration; printing & binding costs are more than that, even in bulk. However, I have heard that the printing costs for hardcover are only a couple of dollars more than for a paperback. And that translates to more than a couple of dollars for the buyer. There's "cost plus markup for profit." If it costs them an extra $1.50 to produce the hardcover, that translates to an extra $4-5 to the end user.
What we're also paying for is
1) immediacy--this is why paperbacks aren't available right away, and
2) perceived quality--doesn't matter if the cost difference is only a little bit; people *want* nice hardcovers on their bookshelves, and they're willing to pay more for them.
The *other* $10-20? Is just profit. I'd say "greed," except that for a long time, people were more-or-less happy to support that model. The high profit margins on hardcovers allows publishers to tolerate book returns, print more copies than they're sure of selling, and spend money on book-signings and such.
And yeah, publishers don't do as much of those things as they used to and are struggling to do less of them, but the point is, that markup absorbed costs for other spots of the industry that they can't get directly paid for. The problem is that they've worked very hard to hide those aspects of the industry (possibly as a prelude to cutting back or eliminating them), and promoted the idea that what you're *really* paying for with a hardcover is the physical object.
They never imagined a growing number of customers who really don't want the physical object. They knew there'd always be a few who preferred the portability of paperbacks, but even those tend to like a few collectible hardcovers. People who read ebooks confuse them; they've never had to market immediacy as a separate feature before.