Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellmark
People always say that the per unit costs are a pittance for ebooks, but in the various breakdowns I've seen, they're not that far off from those of printed books.
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Then why hasn't Baen gone bankrupt? For ten years, they've been selling ebooks cheaper than paperbacks. You'd think that, if the breakdowns were accurate, Baen would feel horribly squeezed by their ebook sales, rather than casually saying, "here, have another CD's worth of free ebooks."
One Australian publisher did a price breakdown for a specific book; publication costs (print, storage, delivery) were about 30% of cover price.
"Big 6" Publishers who release
price breakdowns are very careful to never mention quantities; they say that editing & formatting are $.80/book for either... but that's only true if they sell the same number of books for ebook & print. Editing costs per book decrease as sales increase; printing costs per book don't.
Also: shouldn't editing costs be split between pbooks & ebooks? If they release the book in multiple formats, they're not paying for an editor for each format. They're not paying separately for advertising, either. They seem to be giving a breakdown for "new hardcover" and "new ebook with no paper release"... which none of the Agency 6 are doing.
Having worked in a related industry, I suspect that the "print/store/ship = $3.25/book" cost is flat costs of paper + stamps, not costs of:
- paper +
- someone to put the books in shipping containers +
- someone to track inventory of what's sold vs what's still coming in +
- cost of boxes to ship books +
- cost of software to keep up with shipments in progress
... and so on.
Because while it's just about as cheap to package 50 books for shipment as it is for one, it's not just as cheap to package 1500. Someone's getting a living wage for stuffing all those books into boxes, and someone's paying for the cardboard and wrapping and printing the shipping labels. (Labels cost effectively nothing. The software that produces the labels, costs a trained operator a few minutes--at probably more than minimum wage.)
And of course, returns aren't on the breakdown lists at all. Those cost charts assume every book that gets printed, gets sold.