Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I don't think you're taking into account the fact that most of the cost of producing a book is still present for an eBook. All the work done by the publisher - copy editing, the publicity and marketing, etc - is still present whether the book is printed on paper or distributed electronically. The reason the HB costs $24 is because most publishers rely on the HB print run to recoup their costs - the MMPB is where the profit lies. If the publisher didn't have that pretty much guaranteed pay-back of costs from the HB, they wouldn't publish the book in the first place.
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Actually, some of us are well aware of that fact. Banging that Baen drum again... They make more money (per copy) selling 5 and 6 dollar ebooks than they do from selling paper copies -- even
after charging the pro rata portion of those costs to the eBooks. This is partly because they are the publisher, and thus save the distributor's and retailer's cut of the sale price of the book. Instead, the $$ are split between their web service and the publisher (with author royalties coming out of the publisher's chunk as usual).
eSales are admittedly not enough to run the company on, but they're north of 10% of total revenue -- which is nothing to sneeze at.
In a different note, you say that Baen is a small niche of the market. This is self-evidently true: SF and Fantasy
are a small niche of the bookselling market, and Baen is a slice of that. On the other hand, piracy has not been a problem for their sales -- even for books that hit the NYT bestsellers list and sold hundreds of thousands of paper copies. In fact, they continue to sell both paper and eBook copies of books that they
give away absolutely for free online. Sales of the books they
give away go up, not down! Both in bits and on paper!!
It might not work for Steven King, or for the latest media-tie-in novel, (and who knows for things like text books) but the evidence strongly suggests that low prices and no DRM is the right choice for any fiction that isn't a #1 best-seller. (The highest any Baen author has hit that I'm aware of was David Weber with a #5 best seller. Lack of DRM didn't hurt
HIS sales any!)
Xenophon