Quote:
Originally Posted by Dutchbook
Yet how many people read those?
I worked at a very large european publishing house for a couple of months, and I was told during training that it comes from the fact that for the price of the book, it doesnt really matter if something is physically printed or not. Printing costs are a negligible factor in the costs of books and magazines.
Yet the reader doesnt know or understand it, so they expect a lower price from ebooks.
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Yet printing is not free. Perhaps, we are to believe the costs for warehousing, shipping, handling returns, etc. are also
free negligible?
The last numbers from what I considered a reputable source for cost of print runs for popular books gave about a $3.50 cost for a hard cover and $1.50 for a paperback for printing (those numbers varied widely depending on B&W/colour use, size of page, number of pages, cover, size of print run (a lot of fixed costs no matter what the print run size), etc. so I used the lower end of the costs for a run of 25,000-50,000 books). The other costs associated with printed books ran about $2.50 though that number did not break out formats, just stating this was for shipping, warehousing, dealing with returns, etc. A bit of quick addition gives $4.00 in costs for a paperback that are not going to be present for an ebook.
I've also noted quite a few ebooks that are priced higher than the paperback version -- care to try to explain the costs of production rationale for that?