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Originally Posted by Leep
Agreed that the price for acquiring the book, editing and preparing the book for distribution do not change. However, printing and distributing and physically selling the book are a substantial investment (and risk) per book unit unless you are sure that the book will be a best seller and can mass produce. Comparatively, the cost of selling and distributing an ebook is modest.
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Well, once the electronic infrastructure is in place it is.
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Why would a publisher not sell the ebook version for substantially less when his real costs are substantially less? It's almost like publishers expect ebooks sales to help subsidize paper book sales.
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My point was simply that there is a lot of unrealistic thinking about ebook pricing. There are costs involved that don't go away simply because you are producing an ebook. And you price to cover your costs, so an ebook will priced to at least recover what it cost to produce the book, plus make some money for the publisher. How low you can price the book will depend on what it cost to produce and how many copies you expect to sell.
And if you are a publisher doing paper and electronic versions, you don't want to cannibalize your own market. You can theoretically price ebooks cheaper than paper editions, but you want to make the best possible margins.
You can price ebooks really cheap and make volume, at the expense of cutting into sales of paper books where you may make more money per copy sold, and ultimately reduce your total revenues on the title. This is not what you want.
But yes, some publishers are equally unrealistic about ebook pricing. Failing to understand why the buyer might balk at an electronic edition priced higher than the mass market paperback when the buyer knows perfectly well your costs are lower is a regrettably common example.
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Dennis