Quote:
Originally Posted by taustin
Not according to at least one professional author. Charlie Stross said in his blog that the cost of putting ink on paper and getting it in to our hands is maybe 10% of the total price. The average book requires about a year of effort on the part of the author, and an equal amount of time on the part of the publisher's staff, between editing, typesetting, proofing, etc. So 10% less than the current edition is entirely reasonable. More than the current edition is, as everyone agrees, ridiculous, of course. But ebooks are not nearly as cheap to produce as many people believe, because most of the process is exactly the same.
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I don't know if it's exactly 10% but it is a lot less than 50%. I briefly worked for a publisher back in the day and they would sell books to the big retailers for 50% of the cover price with a buy back policy, meaning if they didn't sell them all they could send them back. That sounds like a no lose situation to me and also explains how retailers can have sales up to 50% off the cover price.