Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I take it that you've never had a book published? Publishers do all sorts of work that's not immediately obviously to those who've not gone through the mill. Firstly, most books are submitted to the publisher are in no fit state to publish; the publisher employs an editor to basically get it into shape. Once it is in shape the publisher's marketting and publicity machine swings into action, and that varies drastically between a book by a "big name celeb" and "Joe Nobody".
Aside from the actual printing costs (which are pretty minimal) all these costs apply equally to eBooks as they do to pBooks.
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I agree with most of the above except that printing costs and inventory carrying costs are not that minimal (after all there is a reason printing on demand is not that successful a business), so there is a significant difference between let's call them the practical costs of publishing an e-book vs a p-book.
However my original point was that the huge variable in creating a book is the author compensation which is determined by the market (or the perception the publisher has about the market) and that variability simply means there is no such a thing as the "cost of production" of a book unless you want to talk about the practical aspects only and that is sort of meaningless. Books are not interchangeable widgets. A book that sells 1M copies is just not the same as a book that sells 400 copies whatever the format.
Ultimately the price is determined by bid and offer, and right now for e-books the offer is very high (for whatever reasons justified or not) to what the bid is, hence the pathetically low dollar value of the e-book business compared to the print book business.
And again my opinion is that this is not going to change whatever new devices are introduced since people just do not want to pay that much for digital content (again for whatever reasons justified or not). The offer need to come way down for the e-book market to take off.