Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Well...
You still have all the costs of writing, editing, layouts, legal, research, marketing, overhead, taxes and retail cut. The only cost you lose is the paper. Generally speaking that's around 15% of the total costs, though it's entirely plausible that the costs are higher for low-volume titles like textbooks. Perhaps 20% or even 25%, but probably not much more.
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The funny thing is if you actually ask the publisher reps that come to campus to push their "textbooks" they will tell you that the cost of textbooks is high because of the extremely expensive cost of printing and binding in limited quantities! Textbook authors (except for a very few big names) do not get "advance payments" and actually only see a penny when direct sales happen.
There are very very few textbook authors that are getting rich off of their textbooks sales.
So where is all of the money going for the DRM ebook version that expires in 8 months? To subsidize the paper copies? I don't think so.