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Originally Posted by Drezin
Is it just me, or do downloadable books cost more than just buying the paperback?
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Originally Posted by Alisa
Usually, yes. It seems strange to us as consumers since we're not getting that physical item that took resources to create, ship, store and sell. We can't usually transfer ownership or our ebooks as we can with the physical item and, if they're DRMed, we may not even have access to them permanently. Most folks feel that they should be paying less than the paperback price. However, the publishers seem to approach it more from the perspective of what the traffic will bear. Personally I think they could sell a lot more ebooks with lower prices and still have way better margins than they had with paper books but they didn't ask me.
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I also have wondered why eBooks aren't priced much less. I found one explanation
here, post 54, quoted below:
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What are the incremental costs to a publisher to publish an ebook. Since the galleys are all electronic, I would think that they would be very low. If this is the case, why aren't there more ebooks?
Because it's not as simple as you think. Firstly, they need to update their sales and accounting systems to handle sales, royalties, discount rates, user licenses for DRM'd sales, and a host of other options. (I gather Hachette's ebook repository system set them back a double-digit millions of euros in programming and development costs: this isn't unusual for the larger publishers.) Then they need to run the galleys through a converter to produce ebook output -- in some formats (e.g. Mobipocket) this is an external for-pay piece of software, in others (Adobe epub) it's a bolt-on output formatter for InDesign. They need serialization software to brand DRMd copies (yes, I know this is stupid and adds to the cost) and they need to check the ebook edition for errata and rendering glitches before they start selling it. Finally, publishers don't sell direct to the public, any more than you buy CDs direct from Warner or Sony: they sell into ebook storefronts like eReader or Fictionwise or the Kindle store, all of whom demand a gigantic cut of the cover price.
The only respects in which an ebook edition is cheaper than a paper one -- to a big publisher who is not willing to junk their entire fulfilment side and start from scratch -- is the saving in paper and ink, which amount to about 5-10% of the cover price.
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