We should get something straight: the "price" of the book, the one that is sometimes printed on the book, is essentially pulled out of the publisher’s ass. I really don't see why it comes as a surprise that they make a very small profit from hardcover sales when they give the books to the big retailers at 50% of the "price". So we have Amazon who can give larger discounts on the "price" since they got the books half-price anyway, and smaller retailers, who got a smaller discount, if any, can't really give discounts.
Then there is the issue with the price for ebooks. It is generally accepted by the people on this forum that the price for paper and printing is around 10% of the "price". So why is it that the publishers refuse to have ebooks come at a smaller price? Why didn’t they want to just set the price of the ebook to 10% lower than the current pbook?
After that we have the costs in relation to moving the books. For this there is no clear answer, since we only have a vague explanation that they are too small to count. And apparently some of the people reading this thread don't think that what the publishers were saying in the 70's counts. How about the year 2000? Is that recent enough to count?
There is an article about the
postal rate increase in the US in the year 2000.
Quote:
No one argues that the Postal Service should not charge publishers every penny it needs to recover costs of delivery. But it shouldn't charge a penny more.
Books, magazines and newspapers serve and important civic and educational function in our society. It is in everyone's interest if they survive.
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So if 10 years ago a 15% increase in the delivery cost would have destroyed the publishing business, it must mean that the costs of moving the books were a significant percentage. When did it change?
And then there is another thing that was mentioned: editing (karunaji, post #40). Why does it take so long and costs so much? Don't the authors use spell-check? Do they give the publishers just a really long txt file that isn't divided into chapters and paragraphs? Just how bad are the initial unaided words of the authors that they need 100 hours of work to fix?