Quote:
Originally Posted by rogue_librarian
That's what they'd like you to believe. In reality, it's just market segmentation. They got the crowd that's ready, willing & able to pay top dollar to get the book as soon as it's published, now for the middle market (trade paperback) before the final run for the bottom (mass market pb). The difference in printing cost is so minimal as to be almost negligible (Was it 2$? Something in that vicinity). That model doesn't work nearly as well for ebooks, of course.
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~$2 for printing--and then there's shipping costs (hardcovers are bigger & heavier; less fit in a box so they cost more to ship), storage (same issue), inventory issues, and shelf space costs. While the publisher doesn't pay to have someone unpack them, load them onto one shelf, move them to another shelf when the initial rush of sales is over, and reshelve them after they've been looked at, those costs are part of the bookstore's cut, which is part of why the price is so high.
Overhead for internet bookstore space is much, much tinier, and not dependent on the size of the book. The difference in bandwidth between a 250 kb book and a 1.4 mb book is negligible; even going up to 45mb PDFs like DriveThruRPG does is negligible.
During Shane Jiraiya Cumming's "Grand Conversation," an Australian publisher
broke down the costs for a hardcover book--they came to over 30% of the cover price.
Retail: AU$34.95
Author's cut: $8.50 (straight fee, not royalty, but works out to ~25%.)
Printing costs: $7.70
Postage: $2
And that's before editing, formatting, etc.
In this case, perhaps it had a small enough print run that the print costs were high. Maybe Australian printing is more expensive than in the US. Maybe he just doesn't command the small prices that Harper Collins can negotiate because they promise to print x million books/year. I'd love to see more publishers willing to state what individual books actually costs to produce; all the estimates by the "big 6" have included both one-time and per-unit costs, without mentioning the print run so we could figure out what the one-time costs are supposed to cover.