Quote:
Originally Posted by taustin
And yet, industry insiders have gone on the record about it, and say that about 10% of the retail price is for putting ink on paper and getting it to the store. So any time you vote for more than a 10% reduction in the price of an ebook, you're voting for lower quality. So say people who I have heard of before and know to be working in the industry.
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That's about right if you assume the book is being shipped straight to the publisher's own bookstore - that's usually not the case, so theere there are costs associated with wholesale and distribution as well. Money Magazine did an interesting comparison a couple of years ago - it doesn't seem to be on their site, but a report is here:
http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/0...ook-costs.html
Also, the publishers' figures are based on an
average; some books (both tree and e) will sell nothing like enough to cover the costs involved, so the better-selling books basically subsidise these. Which is as it should be - the best-selling books aren't necessarily (in fact, in most cases probably aren't!) the best books, but the latter are those that enrich society and will outlive the former. The challenge for publishers will be to match the production process to the book. Some books will deserve the full process to produce a high-quality print edition that will live on for decades; others deserve only to be printed as ebooks (and a percentage of these will sink without trace), and yet others deserve the middle ground of print-on-demand.
As others have pointed out, the issue is obscured even more by the fact that physical books are usually free of VAT, whereas ebooks aren't - that's 20% added on in the UK, so there's one of the biggest reasons. The law is usually well behind the technology anyway, but in this case, the EU seems to be completely unreasonable and is digging its heels in.