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.
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I read through some of the posts and this caught my eye.
I disagree with it being equals. My .ePub files are roughly 600kb, but for the sake of making it easy lets make it 1MB per file.
If you go to
http://www.squarespace.com/pricing/ you will see that their highest plan is $50 a month and they give you 5GB storage. This will be enough for 5,120 eBooks lets round it up to 5,000 eBooks being on the website. (1024MB = 1GB) They give 400GB bandwidth per month.
1024MB x 400GB = 409,600MB again lets round this up to 400,000MB.
They can serve 5000 eBooks to 400,000 people max per month at a cost of $50 a month. If they decided to sell each eBook at a price of $1 they still make $399,950 profit. This all becomes redundant for websites like Amazon, who can already do all of this on top of what they do. I do not know about marketing and advertising just about computing.
I really think they should release eBooks same time as hardcover books and charge like $5 for it instead of the usual hardcover price. When the paperback comes out reduce the eBook price to like $1 or $2.
The best example is iTunes which charge like $1 per song when each is 3Meg roughly.
The main reason I went digital with my books is because of space, I have over a 100books in my room. I have ran out of space on my bookshelf so I had to put some of them into boxes. There is more books I want to read and though it would be better if I went digital.
Wouldn't they actually save money going digital early too? Someone can buy a book, read it and then sell it for cheaper on eBay. They lose money that way. If they went digital with a price of $5 for new books, they would be making more money as the person cannot sell it on eBay. The person who may want to buy it, can buy it new.
Also I know I am in the UK but that web hosting website was in $ and I couldn't be bothered to find the exchange rate so, I kept going with $.