[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

This has interesting implications I haven't seen discussed here, like taxes: in an agent relationship, the producer is responsible for applicable taxes, not the agent. So Amazon, which has a plethora of local tax codes to deal with in web sales that determine whether an item is taxable where the buyer lives and how much tax is charged, charges and remits the applicable sales taxes on items it resells as a retailer, but apparently isn't responsible for those taxes on items sold under Agency Pricing. I have no idea how this is being handled by Amazon and the publishers.

So is this the reason behind georestrictions? An American publisher isn't allowed to sell a book in Europe, so the retailer, now an agent for the ebook is also restricted. Nice.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Acquisition with attendant advance, contract, line edit, copy edit, proofread, cover design and art, markup and typeset and the like will happen regardless of output format. So will allocation of a share of corporate overhead. If the book is being published in hardcover, paperback, and ebook format, the costs will be allocated across all three. If ebook is the only format, it will bear the full load.

That is strange, because in the articles about costs, all of the things you mention are counted for the hardcover price, after which it is said that the ebook will have the same costs, so the publishers effectively count everything twice, plus they ignore the paperbacks.

So please quote an article that talked about "acquisition with attendant advance, contract, line edit, copy edit, proofread, cover design and art, markup and typeset and the like" costs being distributed on all the forms of the book. I dare you.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I don't see levels of approval as adding all that much to costs. But yes, less people would be an important factor.

Have you actually been in meetings to approve something? Think about it: the hours it takes to make a proposal, getting it to meet the expectations of the person directly above only to have a person one step higher have the completely opposite idea. Those hours for all the people involved, plus the overhead costs, plus all the stuff that clutters the network because everything will get mailed, and every person will have a copy of the same document on their computer, and in their email, with everything backed-up for safety; those, if I'm not mistaken, imply costs.