Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Shouldn't the lack of production overhead (Presses, printing, binding and binding equipment, ect.) be reflected in the price of ebooks? If you want to say the are only a small part of the book cost, fine, but then they're fighting their own propaganda, that claims that hardcovers are expensive because they cost so much to produce. The editing costs (making the book better by changing aspects of the writing, correcting things like grammar and spelling) are one shot, no matter what (or how many) formats the book is produced in.
Whether you release the e-book day and date with the hardcover is strictly the publisher's choice. (However, as Hollywood has found out, you get the most bang for your promotional buck if you release all formats while the publicity is still in the minds of most of your customers.)
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This is one of the BPH's biggest problems. They know that the cost to print and ship a hardcover book is something like $2, and for a paperback 50 cents, and the price differential is really so they can recoup all the upfront costs early. The BPH's beef with Amazon was that Amazon was setting an ebook price point for NYT best sellers of $10, instead of 40%-45% off the hardcover list price, a discount common at many brick & mortar retailers. Ultimately, this limits the BPH's ability to raise hardcover prices if they can't force the ebook price to follow suit when they are released simultaneously.
BTW, if you haven't seen it, there's an amusing sequence about Amazon & Bezos this last week in the comic
Non Sequitur . All hail Lord Bezos!