Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s
I think that your questions would be better directed to publishers that moan and groan about the enormous expenses associated with publishing e-books, especially those that claim that the total cost for all aspects of publishing an e-book is greater than the total cost for all aspects of publishing a p-book.
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Yeah, that's not really a problem, nor do I recall many publishers saying that recently, especially in reference to new titles.
With new books, there isn't a lot of additional expenses any more, especially with larger and tech-savvy publishers; they almost certainly have a set workflow by now.
Older books are more problematic. In some cases, digital rights were not explicitly listed in the contracts, so you've got to get the agents and/or lawyers and/or estates involved. Older titles need to be scanned, proofread and put into at least two formats (mobi, epub). It's not an enormous expense, but most backlist titles don't sell much.
Thus: It might only cost, let's say, $2000 to format a backlisted book as an ebook. When you're selling it, 30% goes to the retailer, another 25% for the author's royalty. Sell it for $10 and that means the publisher is getting $4.50; let's say Uncle Sam's cut is 15% of that, so they get $3.85. That means they've got to sell around 520 copies to break even. If they convert 100 ebooks, they've got up-front costs of $200k and need to sell close to 52,000 ebooks just to break even. Do that once a month, and that's $2.4 million in up-front costs and 620,000 in ebook sales (off of 12,000 titles) to break even. That's assuming they do zero marketing, which is highly likely for backlist but also contributes to lower sales figures.
Now, I will say that in the long run, its almost certainly cheaper to do this than to do, say, a dozen 10k print runs where 3/4 of the books sit unread on shelves and in warehouses. But you've still got that big upfront cost, and it's only a bargain as long as the formats aren't obsoleted.
In short: Just because an ebook costs pennies to deliver doesn't mean they cost pennies to produce.