Quote:
Originally Posted by Pinecone
No, the pbooks are so expensive to produce, it they are unsold, the publisher only requires the COVER to be returned, and the rest of the book is trash. That is why so many pbooks have the disclaimer, "If you bought this book without a cover, it is stolen."
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That doesn't mean the mass market paperbacks (the only ones that allow stripping for returns) are cheap, just that shipping them back one at a time costs more than the printing costs.
Greg Weeks
I case you are interested in the actual costs of printing, the last time I looked a few years ago a 200-300 page mass market sized paperback cost about $.75 each to print and bind in reasonable quantity of 5000. Shipping them in pallets to the warehouse added pennies each to the cost. Drop the quantity down and the price goes up steeply. Increase the quantity and the price goes down slightly. I don't know what the costs are today, I'm sure they have gone up. The sweet spot for the number of books to print has changed too I'm sure. Hard cover printing and binding has changed so that it's possible to do short runs of 20 or so hard covers for about $20 each for the printing and binding. Not POD, but actual offset printing. The POD printers have made things easier too. A moderately sized trade paperback can be done with POD for about $9 now in quantity 1. The shipping for quantity 1 will set you back almost as much as the printing and binding.