Quote:
Originally Posted by kindlekitten
substantially more than 1.50 per book then?
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Almost certainly.
You have to remember that there are an assortment of costs for a publisher to publish a book that will be incurred regardless of what format the book is issued in. When a publisher gets a manuscript an editor decides to buy, there will be an advance against royalties to the author to get the publication rights. There will be the costs of line editing, copy editing, proofreading, cover design and illustration, typesetting and markup, and legal cots involved with contracts and rights, as well as an allocated share of the corporate overhead of the publishing company, and if the book sells enough to earn out the advance, there will be additional royalty payments. All of these costs are present for ebooks as well as actual paper volumes.
When you issue as an ebook, you save printing, binding, warehousing, and distribution, but those are only part of the total costs of the book. You still have to cover the costs listed above, which will impose a lower limit on how cheap the ebook can be.
In part, the price will depend upon the expected sales volume. The latest international bestseller from John Grisham or the like might have total sales in the millions, and provide a larger base over which to amortize things like corporate overhead, so pricing
can be lower. Whether pricing
will be lower is another matter. Like anyone else selling a product, the publisher will charge what they think the market will bear. Amazon, for instance, uses tiered pricing, with hot titles starting out priced at full retail and tapering off over time to their normal $9.99 level to take advantage of the fact that some folks will want to read the title as soon as possible and will pay extra to do so.
Books which are more of a niche market item will be another matter. Textbooks, for example, tend to have much higher production costs, smaller markets, and a high obsolescence factor. They can be less expensive as ebooks, but they are unlikely to ever become anything considered "cheap". Technical books, like the computer references O'Reilly and Associates publish are similar cases. They aren't cheap, and probably
can't be.
I see a lot of wishful thinking about how cheap ebooks can be, and frankly, it's just that, wishful thinking. The sooner everyone gets realistic about expectations, the better.
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Dennis