Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
SNIP
My bigger concern is that there are an assortment of costs for a publisher in publishing a book, regardless of whether it is a paper or electronic edition.
You have the cost of acquiring the rights to the book, which will vary depending on perceived value of the book and projected possible sales. You have the time of the editor who acquires the book and does the line edits (which may be different editors), the costs of copy editing and proofreading, the cover art and interior art (if any), and the markup and typesetting to produce the copy that will be the basis of the printed book or the ebook, the cost of the ISBN, plus an allocated share of the overhead of the publishing house.
Those costs will be there whether the book is issued as an ebook or a pbook, and will set a floor on how low an ebook price can be and still make any money for the publisher.
I don't know at the moment just where that floor is (and it will vary depending upon the book,) but I suspect it is higher than a lot of folks would like to believe.
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Dennis
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Those costs are certainly there, and need to be covered. That said, we have one useful data point -- Baen makes money on eBooks at $6.00 a pop, while charging each copy its proper pro-rated share of the fixed costs. That is, if a book sold half its total copies in bits they'd charge half the fixed costs to the e-sales for purposes of determining profitability. They report being
very happy with eBook sales; they make a little less than hardcover, but more than paperback on each ebook sold.
Oh yeah, they also sell the majority of their eBooks via bundles that include four front-line and a zero-to-four re-issues for $15. So figure that their average selling price per eBook is actually well below $6.00.
Xenophon