[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

?!? To what end?

He is printing a book; he wants to be on the good side of the publishers. Plus "Cambridge University professor John Thompson spent five years talking with book editors, publishers, writers, and agents on both sides of the Atlantic.", what side did you think that he was going to take if he spent his time talking to anyone but the readers?

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Actually he's fairly consistent. You just haven't quite grasped the totality of what he's saying, to wit:

- 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?

Don’t patronize me. What the consumers are saying is that the ebooks should cost less than the pbooks, the difference being the costs that occur only in the case of dealing with a physical object. They are talking about not only the 10% due to printing, but also "cutting out the distribution, real estate, returns, and everything associated with the side of physically moving the books". This is only fair, considering the fact that we need to invest money in a device and/or software to view ebooks.

There are two issues that I have with what the esteemed professor is saying:

1. He mentions these two separated by "But people think, “Well, if you get rid of the book, your costs must be zero, or very little.” But in fact that’s just not the case.", which makes readers sound completely unreasonable, as if they are expecting to get the books for free.

2. He doesn't talk about what percentage is "associated with the side of physically moving the books". This leaves most people who will read this article to think that ebooks cost only 10% less to make.

And this is what I mean by purposely misleading. The question was simple and straight-forward: "Aren't they easier and cheaper to distribute?". The easy answer would have been yes, they are. That would have been the answer of somebody impartial.