[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

Which is not the cost of the book, from the point of view of the consumer.

No, it's the price of the book.

The problem here is precisely that the price the consumer is charged is determined in part by the costs of the producer, and there's an enormous amount of confusion about what the producer's costs are and wishful thinking about what the price charged to the consumer could be.

But if half the books are returned, then the actual print/distribution cost per unit sold are twice what is being discussed.

That's what reserve against returns is all about. But that shouldn't be a factor in ebooks.

And those costs are the ones which are most significantly reduced by moving to eBooks, so it seems rather disingenuous to exclude them.

Who is excluding them? Are you suggesting that reserve against returns be applied to ebooks as well as print editions?

The costs I mentioned above are all of those involved in acquiring a manuscript and preparing it for production, incurred before publication takes place. They apply to paper and ebook editions.

I exclude reserve against returns at that point. If I'm only publishing an electronic edition, they are meaningless. If I'm publishing paper and electronic, they should only be applicable to paper.

But we don't have wholesale prices and retailers any more for eBooks, do we? We have agents, and the publishers are setting the retail price, not the wholesale one.

We don't have wholesale prices and distributors?

If I publish an ebook, and sell directly to you, there's no wholesale price. Wholesale is what gets charged to a reseller. If I sell through someone else who takes a cut for providing the service, I'd call my price to them the wholesale price. Their price to you is the retail price. I'd call that true regardless of whether the reseller is a retailer in the usual sense, or an agent under the Agency Model. What would you call the price Amazon pays the publishers under the Agency Model, since it's not the price they charge you?

And while we don't have distributors in the sense of selling physical goods, who distribute products to retailers too small to deal directly with manufacturers, we do have resellers who sell directly to customers, and differences in the price they pay to the publisher and the one they charge you.
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Dennis