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Originally Posted by Halk
I hadn't come up with an option for hardback without audio - as I said I was picking arbitrary prices to make an example.
The complete would be 20 dollars, delivered. So you'd get a hardback, and 1 data CD with MP3s on it. Or if you wanted, 24 dollars, delivered for the hardback, and audio CDs of the audio book.
And really on principle you aren't paying for the eBook at all. You buy the content and you can add the eBook on at a cost of 0. So yeah, it's 6 dollars for the eBook, but that'd perhaps get people away from saying "I'm paying for an eBook I don't want, I only want it on paper".
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well, regardless, as you say the important thing is to separate the *content* from the *container* and allow people to buy the content alone (this means the ebook, which is, granted, a form of container --especially if we start down the slippery slope of formats, etc.
-- however practically speaking i don't think many people will make this distinction, not for long anyway, because it's far too abstract), or pay a supplement to the price for a more costly-to-produce type of container.
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I don't think though that printing costs are as high as they may be made out to be. I also think that perhaps in the future there will be more POD (Print on demand) and more central storage of books than there is now. I would expect there's a lot of overheads attached to paper books - a complete guess as follows.
1 dollar to print the thing
Cost to ship it to the retailer.
Cost of having 10 bookstores, and having to make sure each individual store has stocks of a book - e.g. some might sell out, some might sell none. So there's going to be at least some degree of moving them about.
Shrinkage (which means damages, and theft - i.e. at a stocktake it isn't there, or it needs to be discounted as it's damaged or thrown out).
In other words the cost of the paper edition isn't all about the cost of printing it, there's (I expect) larger costs associated with stocking it, hiring a location for the store, staff, shrinkage, redistribution etc.
Perhaps as the online model moves away from this, minimising these costs then it really will be a case of costing 2 dollars to print a book and have it sent out. Sure larger books will cost more (more printing, heavier parcels) but your normal throwaway paperback can't be that expensive if it's a large efficient organisation.
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well, you may be right that the cost of printing is lower than i think, i don't really know much about it. however i was taking into account the peripheral costs you mentioned as well (such as moving the books about... especially since in the article they mention returning something like 40% of books to the publisher to be "pulped"
what a scandalous waste of ressources !) and these must definitely add up.
so based on the *current model* i think half price for an ebook is reasonable. if printing prices go down, this could change, although i sincerely hope it would change in a way that is beneficial to everyone, that is, the price of paper books will decrease corresponding to the reduced costs of the editors, rather than "reduce the gap" between paper and digital prices without any reduction passed along to the end consumer...
there's a book i would like to read which is priced at 20€ for the first release large "fancy" paperback, and...
19€ for the ebook. to me that is undefendable. especially since the first edition of this book contained typo errors !! (however, in defense of the editor, i must add that they have released a new ebook edition, where the errors have been corrected. i saw this in a conversation in the french discussion thread). i did not buy it because i refuse to pay so much for an ebook. i'm hoping that when the "pocket" size paperback comes out at a lower price, the price of the ebook will be reduced as well (this seems to be often the case), but this seems like a completely backwards way of operating to me. or, as you said, like price-gouging on the publisher's part.