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Old 11-30-2011, 10:00 PM   #47
Elfwreck
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Quote:
Originally Posted by carld View Post
I can only go by what I've experienced and read over a lot of years. I've seen far too many complaints from publishers about the physical costs of publishing and distributing paper books to ever accept that those costs suddenly don't matter. I don't buy it, and I never will.
Stross' own breakdown of how books are made describes the process in 17 steps... four-and-a-bit of which are solidly print-and-ship. It's not a small part; it's a quarter of the production process, regardless of the price of paper per book. A *lot* of time and effort--and therefore money--goes into those steps.

Publishers get veeerrry slippery about breaking down actual costs beyond their vague outlines, and they refuse to break down by *both* cost-per-book and cost-per-batch. They refuse to clarify which costs are per-unit and which are per-title, and therefore get cheaper the more books they sell. (Also, they refuse to acknowledge higher printing costs for smaller print runs; they give estimates based on bestsellers, not their midlist.)

And even with the funny numbers games (they refuse to use paperbacks, which their numbers would say are a dead loss), their accounting shows them making a dollar or two more per ebook sale, over the hardcover, for $12.99 ebooks. So it comes out as "We shaved off $3 in production costs--the printing--and increased our profits by half of that anyway." Hmmm.
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