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Originally Posted by bminata
Frankly I'm getting tired of publishers or their defenders trying to justify ebook price = hardcover price by selling bull like "the production cost is miniscule."
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Print/bind/warehouse/distribute come to perhaps 20% of the total cost for a book. That's not minuscule, but it's not enough that dropping it will alone permit the kind of ebook prices a lot of folks with for.
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Do they seriously think we're going to believe that the "printing + binding + warehousing + distributing + returns + limited shelf space/life equals the cost of selling electronically?" Because that's pretty much the difference between print books and ebooks. The other costs including advance, editing, art et al are pretty much the same.
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Correct in part. "The other costs including advance, editing, art et al are pretty much the same" is true save for the advance and the royalties given. The advance will be based on the number of copies the publisher thinks it can sell. And hardcovers have a higher royalty rate than paperbacks.
But basically, publishers want to make money.
Any producer will price at what they think the market will bear. The question is just what that is, and they are engaged in finding out, often the hard way.
There is the additional problem is that many publishers are simply trying to
survive. There are too many books chasing too few readers, and the industry has gone through waves of consolidation as smaller houses were acquired by larger ones to get economies of scale and reduce costs (with attendant losses of publishing jobs.)
You can make one fairly solid assumption: you will
not be able to buy an ebook issued
at the same time as the hardcover edition, sold at the mass market paperback rate many folks consider a reasonable top end for an ebook edition price. If you want it early, you'll pay a premium for faster access. If you want the lower price, you'll have to wait for the PB edition, at which point the ebook edition should drop in price to match.
I'd say everything else, including exactly what the various prices will be, is up in the air.
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Dennis