Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
Production costs are a relatively small portion of the publisher's outlay, and distribution costs are borne by the distributor not the publisher. So publishers don't see a large portion of the savings by going e.
People often tout the reduced marginal costs of ebooks as a reason for lower prices. Yes, once the initial outlay has been paid off the marginal cost becomes very low (mostly just royalties and DRM licensing fees if applicable).
The problem is that you need to pay off those initial costs first, before the low marginal cost can save you - and most ebooks don't sell enough copies to do that. You can't amortize your setup costs over ten thousand copies if you only sell five hundred, and that's the situation ebooks are in now.
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I'm not really sure I agree, here. As I understand it, in the paper world, retailers get about 50% of the price. If hardcovers cost 25$, that leaves roughly 13$. Roughly 2$ are spent on every hardcover printed, with a chance that only part of all hcs will sell, and then I understand that the pbacks are also paid for with the money made through hc sales. All of these costs are up-front, and fairly substantial. This means that in a digital world, you need a substantially lower lump sum payment up-front. This would seem to add up to quite a bit, if you consider that this only matters for the riskiest books, and definitely make a dent in publishers' balance sheets. (Which are touted as the reason why they need to increase the prices on all other titles. Unless they're lying, of course.
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Say the money saved here amounts to another 1-1.5$ off the average production price, (assuming no paper printed at all) then this adds up to 3-5$ saved. That's nearly 40% of their operating cost, so long as you assume no print runs at all!
Basically, if my silly maths hold water, I would suggest 'they' just try selling ebooks to ereader-owners first for titles they deem risky, and later decide whether to actually print the books and reach the larger market.
Anyway, WRT incorporating ebooks into the new book production chain: the money spent to create a mobi file from a word document should be trivial, yet will likely still result in less formatting issues than most re-digitized books suffer from.