Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
That's certainly not my understanding and it seems to be counter-intuitive. Perhaps there is someone here with more knowledge of the industry who can comment.
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I've been following publishing for 40 years, and know a number of folks in the industry.
It may seem counter intuitive, but it's
true.
Book publishing is like movie production, TV production, or record albums. Most offerings tank, and the producers all hope enough will sell to cover the loses on the ones that don't.
You get the old retailer joke "We lose money on every sale, but we make it up on
volume!" No you don't. You go belly up.
For something
really counter intuitive, the amount of the normal book budget allocated to print/bind/warehouse/distribute is
10%-15% of the average book's budget. Dropping print editions entirely would not drop the costs enough to reach the price levels a lot of folks would like to see. Over 80% of the costs of publishing a book are incurred
before the book reaches publication in
any form.
Most books
don't earn out, and are losses for the publisher. (And I've seen a claim elsewhere that a good agent tries to get an advance high enough the book
won't earn out. Since the vast majority of books don't sell well enough to generate royalties, the advance is all the author [and agent] will see, so go for as much up front as possible.)
On the original question, two comments.
First, eBooks here are an
additional format for books, and not a
replacement for print editions. I have thousands of books in both formats, and some in both eBook
and print editions.
Some books just aren't a good fit for eBooks. I was a graphic designer at one point, and retain an interest. I have books on art, art history, architecture, design, photography and typography. The problem with them is form factor - they need a much larger display area than a practical eBook viewer can have. (There's a reason such things are called "coffee table" books.)
And on a related note, an awful lot of books are issued as PDFs. Those are a poor fit on an eBook viewer screen. My normal eBook viewer is an Android tablet with a 7" screen. I get ePub by preference, and can configure things so I get the equivalent of a mass market PB page on a screen. ePubs reflow to fit display sizes. PDFs generally don't, and sideways scrolling to view a wide page is actively painful. I transfer books to my device with Calibre, and create a virtual library containing only ePubs to pick from to send to device.
Second,
price is at best a secondary consideration in what books I buy. My scarce resource is my discretionary
time to
read the books. Reading is a foreground activity that demands my full attention. It competes with a lot of other things. The biggest competitor for reading for most is TV. It isn't for me, since I watch next to no TV, but there is plenty of other competition (like participating here...)
I have more books in both formats I already own than I have time to read now, and I tell people "The nice thing about eBooks is that you don't call the EMTs is my To Be Read stack topples over on me!"
(Since the print titles I buy tend to be hardcovers, you might have to call the EMTs if
they did.)
If I want to read the book badly enough, and it's a book I might want to
keep and
read again, I'll buy it. Price will likely not be an issue.
People say "I can't afford to buy all the books I want!" Neither can I. But a thing I learned as a small child was that I couldn't have what I wanted, when I wanted it, just
because I wanted it. A thing I learned as an adult was that resources were finite, and I would need to prioritize and decide what was important to me, and what I could pass on. I do so.
And as mentioned time to read the books is the major limiting factor. I'm a fast reader, and can go through a book a day reading light fiction. The stuff I'm reading these days is deeper and weightier, and requires time and concentration. It's complicated by the fact I have broad interests, and spend a bit of time deciding which books to read, and which new books I likely
will read.
______
Dennis