Quote:
Originally Posted by Dulin's Books
The main reason for the cost of ebooks be "high" is that the actual printing and distribution of a physical book is actually a minor part of the retail cost. Also there is no "paperback" version of an ebook.
The publisher's for the most part have settled on pricing the ebooks with a discount from the hardcover physical book retail price. Then there is the fee for the DRM license and the cost of servers etc etc for the actual digital distribution.
There are allot of people that have to get a paycheck between the author of any book, physical or digital, and you. The paper makers , binders and truckers are a very small fraction for the physical book.
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So right, that most of the cost of any book, ebook or not, goes to expenses in preparing the book for publication, not the actual publication. But there's also another factor involved-competition.
One of the fundamental rules of marketing in a business which both sells directly and via a distribution chain is that, unless you're prepared to have your distribution chain stop selling your product, you don't undercut them.
In accordance with that, when you're selling paperbacks via the distribution chain then you price your ebooks at paperback prices-and when you're selling hardbacks via the distribution chain then you price them at hardback prices. Note that 'at' is inexact. Some direct sellers try to keep their prices slightly above their distribution chain's prices, others keep their prices slightly below-but only slightly. If they undercut them drastically then they lose the distribution chain-and also their sales & advertising.
Distribution chains don't exist because they're convenient, they exist because they're profitable for the publishers. Until that changes (about the time ebooks become universal? or when H*** freezes over? I'm not optimistic here-best I hope for is that ebooks will become 'normal', don't expect they'll ever become universal) I doubt if you'll see really low prices for new 'best seller' releases. (Other than promotions, such as FW's 100% rebate on the NYT best sellers.)
As for GR, I blame the authors as much-maybe more-than I do the publishers. Contracts are agreements between two parties. Maybe for new authors the publisher has more power to dictate terms, but for a proven seller (doesn't even need to be a *best* seller-just someone who's had a couple of books published with enough sales to show a profit) it would be fairly easy for them to exclude ebook rights, or specify that they be world-wide. If they cared. So I say it's two-fold. Few authors care & few publishers have adopted ebooks sufficiently to create a separate policy for them.