Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Paperback books; hardcovers are more, I believe. (But not much more, even with fancy dust jackets. $2-3? As much as $5, sometimes? Up to $10 for big textbooks with color pics, maybe? Probably not that much.)
However, the costs of pbooks don't end at printing. Packing, shipping, storage, and inventory tracking are all part of the physical costs that don't exist for ebooks. And each of those adds substantial layers (costs) between publisher and purchaser, which could be bypassed for ebooks. Even ebooks sold by a third-party store are skipping several steps that brick-and-mortar stores have to deal with; a bad winter flood will never wipe out half their stock.
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True enough, but eBooks also have costs. There is the machine they sit on, there is the conversion programs and costs upgrading and testing new versions, basically IT costs. There are DRM costs. Customer support problems with eBooks. Customer expectations want free upgrades as errors are found which adds costs. Multiple formats to support. Some publishers farm all this out and pay an outside service. They still have to track sales and do accounting for costs. And they believe every one of these sales cuts into the sale of a paper book.
Dale