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Originally Posted by HansTWN
Apart from the fact that you forgot the overhead (and that if the ebook is sold at an incredibly cheap price then very few pbooks will be sold and all overhead costs have to be paid for by ebooks), since when is there always a direct relationship between unit cost and selling price? They charge what they can get.
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Not sure if your post was a reply to me or someone else but I'd hope I was clear in that I was talking about the per-copy cost. I wasn't trying to say that they should sell books for $0.00004. I'm only talking about the production and delivery cost -per-copy-.
Once you add in the cost of formatting, editing, licensing, advertising, et cetera you'd come up with so many per-title costs that would have to be spread across each copy that the cost for consumers would instantly rocket upwards. But the cost to create and deliver each copy of an ebook doesn't change.
The reason why I did my original post is that there seems to be some measure of confusion muddying the waters. Once everyone realizes the actual cost to replicate and deliver a digital product that part of the discussion should die out. What is left is the more interesting aspects, namely obsolete business models and massive overhead costs.
I know nobody is going to do so but if you go back a number of pages you'll find one of my posts questioning why publishers are so unwilling to slim down the bloat and embrace digital for what it truly is; a chance to operate at virtually nil expenses compared to physical products. These expenses exclude the cost of editing, covers, etc of course since those would be the same for both physical and digital products (felt obliged to add that last sentence or someone would jump on it for sure).
It really isn't so far a stretch, there's thriving examples of innovate business models based on this concept. Baen is a perfect example of an entity that has one foot in the old model and one in something entirely new. Most websites function this way, can you just imagine how much it'd cost to get a print press and all the other peripherals compared to starting a digital news outlet? It just seems that most publishers want to bend digital into fitting what they perceive as "the way it should be" instead of evolving along with the times.
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i dont know where the myth that a large portion of indie stuff is crap comes from. i exclusively buy indie novels and have yet to buy one that i consider garbage. those sample chapters they give are pretty damn helpful.
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I'd say a lot of it is perceived value. There's a reason why certain brands intentionally float their prices upwards. A $10 product must be better than a $1 product. It's something rooted in our sense of perception. But then again, there is crappy indie books just like there's crappy regularly published books so neither of us can prove the other party wrong. They say indie books are mostly crap because they've found crap when they looked, we say indie books are great because we've found gems.