Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
What about storage, delivery, warehousing, disposal. With an eBook you don't need to decided if the initial run is to be 10k or 100k. You just create a file as the books are purchased. This has GOT to be less expensive than printing etc. As you say, the "cost" of all this is in the price of the book. If those costs were eliminated and the books are sold for the same price (which already seems to be the case with eBooks) then the publisher gets that extra money, yes?
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Warehousing and distribution are also factored into the cover price.
And eliminating those costs doesn't necessarily provide the advantage you might wish.
When a publisher contracts for a book, the biggest imponderable is "How many copies will it sell?" The publisher's guess on that determines what they are willing to pay as an advance, and how generous the contract terms will be.
A book expected to sell really well will get a larger initial print order, but that's not the biggest factor in the costs. When you are printing a book, setup and makeready are big costs. Once the book is on the press, ready to go, the incremental cost of printing one more copy is a tiny fraction of the total cost. Indeed, economies of scale come into play: the more copies you print, the larger a base you have over which to spread the overhead, and the overhead becomes a proportionately smaller amount of each book's unit cost.
(While technology has changed matters somewhat in recent years, this is why it usually wasn't economic to do color printing in short runs. The cost per copy was simply too great.)
The publisher sells to the wholesaler at an agreed upon quantity discount. The wholesaler resells to the retailer. (In the case of really big retailers, like B&N or Borders, the publisher probably sells direct.) The price the retailer charges you may be discounted, but that comes out of the retailer's margin. Huge discounts by retailers tend to be "loss leaders", to get the customer into the store, where they are likely to walk out with other titles besides the one in the discount offer.
And the sort of discounts folks like Borders can offer, and the reason why the independent bookstores are getting squeezed, is bound up in the whole economies of scale issue. Borders can get a much better price per copy ordering 50,000 of a bestseller to supply their nationwide chain than the local bookstore can ordering 50 from Ingram, can pass that price advantage to the customer, and does.
Yes, an ebook can be cheaper to produce and sell, because manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution essentially go away as costs, and the resulting book can be sold cheaper.
So what? Is
price the only issue affecting book sales? Is the number of books you read constrained by the number you can afford to buy?
It isn't here. My constraint is the
time I have available to read the books, and I have a very large To Be Read stack in both paper and electronic editions. (The advantage to the electronic TBR stack is that you don't need to call the paramedics if it topples over on me...)
Books compete for the reader's discretionary time as well as dollars, and must vie for attention with all of the other things the reader might do instead. A shift to ebooks won't affect that equation at all.
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Dennis