Quote:
Originally Posted by drofgnal
I don't understand why an ebook should be the same price as a hardcover, and I'd not pay it. There is an awful lot of cost associated with paper, printing, packaging and shipping that is not there with an ebook. I want to see certain titles when the hardcover comes out, but then again, I'm not going to pay what I think is a premium to get them. If an ebook is the same cost as the hardcover, I'd rather wait.
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Other threads have covered this. Until publishers & booksellers open their accounting books we won't have really solid numbers, but most people seem to agree that the cost of paper, printing, etc that's required for pbooks is about equal to the cost of servers & bandwidth that's required for ebooks. Most of the cost is in preparing & advertising the book, not in printing & distributing it-and those costs apply regardless of media.
Again, I can't find solid numbers, but I suspect that the higher price of hardbacks is mostly because, for most books, they're only published in hardback when they're new. So the cost is really for a 'new' book and the fact of it being published in hardback is irrelevant. (And for those that continue to be published in hardback, at the higher hardback prices, after they've also been published in paperback or ebook, at lower prices, I suspect that's 'because they can'. Once people have been conditioned to think that hardbacks cost more the publishers can get away, basically forever, with charging more for them. Whether there's a reason to do so or not.)