Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Does anyone know the cost of a pbook (that has a price of $7.99 before any discounts) when the price of the paper, printing, shipping, storing, etc are all removed from the cost? I want to know what the price of an electronic book really costs. I'm not talking with markups. I'm talking the expense to make this book before it becomes a pbook. I'm not talking matching the ebook to the hardcover or to the new format that's just designed to suck our money from our wallets. But the ordinary pbook at $7.99 price. What is the remaining price once you remove all the pbook specific costs.
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Unfortunately, the answer is "it depends". A paperback in a book store with a price of $7.99 on its cover is probably obtained from the publisher for $3.60 (standard discount is 55% off cover price). This is the "margin" for the book store.
If the price of the book is this low, that probably means it has been printed in a large run. The size of the print run has an enormous impact on the price per book. As an example, a 176-page, black and white, standard format paperback costs about $5.25 per book if you print 200, $4.50 per book if you print 500, and down to $0.83 if you print 10,000. (Numbers are from Morris Rosenthal's book on Print-On-Demand.) Say the printing costs were $0.83 for this particular example. That leaves $2.77 for the publisher.
Most other costs in book-making are fixed (i.e. they don't really vary with the number of books produced) such as typesetting, cover design, etc.
I will post another reply to this thread but I will first have to count to a very large number or my post will be moderated "abusive".