Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
So does anyone actually know how much of a book's cost is the printing, the paper, the shipping, the storage, the cost to the store to stock it and so on for things related to a paper book that are not related to an eBook? I know eBooks have the cost of DRM added to them. But the storage costs are minimal, no shipping costs, no printing costs, no warehousing costs, no costs to have it on the shelf etc. These are the things we should know to know how much less an eBook actually costs to make then the pBook.
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There isn't any way to come up with absolute answers for this, because a lot of the costs are both per-unit and variable by quantity: it costs $X per book to ship a few books, but $X/2 if they ship at least 1000 at a time. In order to sort out how much the book costs to produce per-unit, they have to decide how many units to make, and how many shipments they'll be divided into, and so on.
(And publishers never mention returns when they discuss costs of bookmaking. It's like we're supposed to pretend those books don't affect the prices of the ones that do sell.)
A print run of 25,000 has a different per-book cost from a print run of 5,000, even if they have the same paper, setup, and so on. And, of course, they don't want to discuss how much variation is in the payment-to-authors part; they average that across entire lines. They could average all the numbers across all their production lines, but doing so just gets useless numbers--of course they don't spend "fifty-five cents per book" on advertising. They spend thousands of dollars advertising the big bestsellers, and nothing advertising the midlist besides publishing a "what's new this month" catalog.
The real issue in the price statements is how much is duplicated on both sides: author advance, editing costs and advertising are calculated for ebooks as if the pbook didn't exist. They don't say how much *more* it costs to produce an ebook, added to what they're already paying to produce the hardcover; they say how much it would cost to produce one as a stand-alone product.