Quote:
Originally Posted by calvin-c
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.)
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I can't buy the fact that it costs the same to bring an e-book and hardback to market. Assume that the cost of editing, marketing and creating the file (either for press or ebook)are identical, that I grant you. But to assume that distribution of the content via electronic means or paper is the same is just wrong. Printing presses, binding equipment, packaging equipment (not to mention material costs) are all complex automated mechanical machines with huge price tags that have to be paid off. Now granted they pay that off over countless books but there is still a huge bill in maintenance and upkeep. One server can store and distribute hundreds of thousands of titles and adequate bandwidth is not that expensive either, a copy of even war and peace being at best 3 Mb or equivalent in file size to a couple of pictures in a email attachment. An apple pro-x server is a little over 3 grand, and up keep is nothing like complex mechanical machinery.