Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
- The printing costs are fairly small (10%), far less than people presume.
- Other cost savings come from cutting out the intermediaries and eliminating brick & mortar costs.
With the latter, a big chunk of that is already shaved off by the online retailers -- e.g. Amazon can nail Borders and everyone else on costs, because they don't need physical stores.
I.e. most people assume that what they're charging for is the paper, when in fact most of it is the costs of bringing the book to market. Advances, royalties, editing, marketing, yadda yadda yadda.
Does that make a bit more sense now?
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These threads always boil down to this same point don't they?
I think you're on shaky ground when you start tossing out a single percentage like that, because the printing/distribution/warehousing cost varies with the number of units printed. So for a giant run of a book, the printing costs are going to be much higher, and much higher percentage of the total cost than for a smaller run.
For a smaller run, all of the fixed costs are going to be a higher percentage.
So I have a problem with anyone saying "the cost is xx%", because I think it erodes the credibility of the argument because it obviously is only true for a particular print run size (and for a particular book).
But it is interesting in all these arguments that we don't seem to have touched on the fact that the costs for an ebook for the retailer are almost nothing, at least compared to that of a bricks and mortar store.