Quote:
Originally Posted by allp
Hello,
Was recently looking for a book via inkmesh.com, found it was on sale at Amazon and Kobo (plus others), went to Amazon and discovered the Kindle version was at $15, the new paper book at $18, and used paper books started at $2.
I feel the delta between Kindle and new paper is just too small, they must save a fortune in printing, shipping, storing etc so the ebook should be cheaper, say around $10.
Is this common? What are people's thoughts on the subject?
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According to authors and industry types I've seen talk about the business of publishing, the cost of putting ink on paper and getting it in to the store is about 10% of the retail price. So, really, no, they don't actually save all that much on ebooks.
Most of what a publisher should be doing has little to do with the final format. They should be editing - not copyediting, which is to say, spell checking, but actual editing, helping the writer put together a coherent story, and tell it in a compelling way, and marketing, both of which require a lot of time and expertise. (Mind you, I agree that most publishers do a crappy job at most of this these days, but they do an equally crappy job on the paper versions, so this isn't an ebook/pbook issue.)
Charlie Stross (who is an award winning SF author) estimated that his publisher put about as many-hours in to publishing his book as he did writing it - not counting printing costs.
The Agency pricing model is an attempt to retain a now outdated business model, where hard covers cost quite a bit more to make, and justify a significatly higher retail price, in an industry where profits are a percentage. In other words, if you make a 5% profit on any type of book, you make more profit on a more expensive book, and hard covers are more expensive. If ebooks are priced like paperbacks from Day One, it really, really seriously impacts the publishers profits (and not just from the lower retail price - it also reduces the number of hard cover sales by competing with themselves). There is a legitimate concern there, even if Agency pricing is a very stupid solution.
I suspect, in the long run, when paper books are a specialty market, and nearly all books are about as ebooks, the pricing will be fairly static, but will be around, or just above, what paperbacks cost today. That, or the industry will collapse, as an industry, and everyone will self publish through places like Amazon, and quality will get even worse than it is today.