Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
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As for savings, publishers don't pay distribution costs, distributors do. Distributors also do most of the warehousing. So why should publishers be the ones who take the cut when it's the people downstream of them who see the savings?
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The list price of a physical book includes these costs, that's why they have to be removed. It's the wholesale price that is being used by most people as the comparison and the printing costs need to be removed from that price and not the list price. We don't know the wholesale price so we assume that when Amazon sells a hard cover book for $14 the wholesale price must be around $12. Remove $2 for the printing costs and you're down to $10.
Now you have to remove the cost of returned stock and managing the inventory reporting from the brick and mortar stores. Also the publishers risk is much lower overall and their costs are much easier to predict, therefore less value.