Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Counter-example:
Baen Books produces two $25 hardbacks each month. All their hardback releases for the past ten years have also been available for $6 as an ebook, two weeks before the hardback hits the shelves. Indeed, their entire output each month (6 books on average) is available in ebook form for a total of $15.
Baen are profitable, and continue to sell hardbacks, paperbacks and ebooks.
There's no reason why other publishers couldn't do the same, if they stopped wasting money on DRM, and told Amazon and other retailers that insisting on the same cut for ebooks as for paper books was ridiculous.
|
It's important to note that Baen does this, in part, by cutting out one-and-a-bit levels in the distribution chain. Their eBooks skip the "distributor" step entirely (that would be Ingrams, etc. in the paper book world), thus skipping their cut of the selling price as well. In addition, the cut taken by Webscriptions (which is a separate business from Baen Books, although it's occasionally hard to tell that from the outside) is rather lower than that taken by Amazon, for example. Finally, Webscriptions takes on a larger portion of the preparation of eBooks than do other eBook retailers (thus reducing costs for Baen). So most of the improved pricing at Webscription comes from disintermediation, rather than from getting rid of paper and its associated costs.
Xenophon
(All of the above written from memory, so apply an appropriate amount of salt.)