Quote:
Originally Posted by Tony1988
I'm surprised that people who are willing to buy a new 120-300 dollar device every year to read books on, are still complaining about ebook prices. Lol. I look at it this way, you are getting something from a paper book that you don't get from an ebook and there are things you get from an ebook that you dont get with paper. It all evens out in the end.
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How many people are buying a new ereader every year? My Kobo Aura One is coming up on two years old and I don't plan on replacing it until a new device is more compelling. I've seen this referenced as one reason that ereaders sales are not soaring -- unlike your smart phone, ereaders basically do one task and there has been no major change in how they do that task. Which might be why my son's newest phone cost over $1200 Cdn while Amazon's high end Oasis 2 32GB clocks in at $490 Cdn and Kobo's Aura One clock in at $250 Cdn. The Aura One LE 32GB is, for whatever twisted corporate reasons, not available in Canada.
As for the cost of an ereader compared to the cost of ebooks? My ebook collection has cost me a lot more than the total I've spent on my ereaders since my first purchase of the original Kobo. About 6% the last time I totalled the costs.
As has been mentioned to death, ebooks do not have the printing, shipping, returns, taxation (you do know about inventory taxes?) or any of the other overhead of a physical book. Much of the production costs is likely spread over HC/MMPB/PB/eBook so that is likely to be pretty much the same for all formats. So I would expect the cost of an ebook to always be lower than a physical book. Yet, I look at the BPH and find that a lot of ebooks are priced over the cost of the paperback.
Years back, there was a comment from Jim Baen on why they did not do short runs on out of print books:
Book Costs and Short Runs
This answer was given to a request to reprint even a few copies of =End Run= which is out of print
The problem is, we can sell maybe a thousand a year while we need to print 15,000 to justify printing at all because a large part of the printing cost is "set-up." Thus if set-up is the same for printing a thousand at, say $4500, while actual printing costs are fifty cents per unit, the actual cost per unit in the first case is a five thousand dollars for a thousand units, or a prohibitive $5 per unit, whereas in the second case the cost is twelve thousand dollars for 15,000 units, or eighty cents per unit.
If I sell books for six bucks that cost me five bucks just to manufacture I'll go broke pretty fast. I get maybe two bucks per book to pay for everything except distribution — the bookstore's profit, authors royalty, manufacturing, cover art, rent and electricity.... everything including baby's new shoes.
I would strongly suspect that the setup costs have not dropped a nickel since that post was written.