Quote:
Originally Posted by DD1509
Net-net - any publisher who decides to embrace the electronic market place is likely making more money per book on electronic offerings than they ever did via hard or soft cover publishing...period. They are simply taking the advantage of a higher-profit medium and unfortunately mixing the higher-profit medium into their lower-profit medium.
Their fixed costs for electronic publishing are much lower than their costs for hard/soft over publishing. Don't let them kid you. But since their system is mostly based in the older, hard cover/soft cover world, they must still mix their high costs with the lower costs of electronic publishing. It equals a better product margin but it will not get increasingly better into they stop selling the lower margin hardcover books via their current costly distribution system.
For example, a publisher who sends a title to electronic publishing saves money in all of the following areas for every electronic version sold (of course not every book will be sold via this method). The question is which method really supports the other???
But let's assume the following for publishers who sell electronic copies:
No printing
No binding
No hard covers and no hard cover artwork
No distribution costs to other houses/re-sellers/no middle-men
No distribution of a lot of heavy products
No storage for a lot of heavy products
These items alone likely cost the publisher about 20-25% of their income on a given book, So when they decide to go electronic, they save approximately 20-25% immediately.
Of course, they will tell you that this is not true. Their hard cover efforts are what really sell a book. Their advertising, their promotion, their book-signing efforts, their advances and payments to the author and all of that.
Net-net - now that Steve Jobs changes the pricing schema, publishers can easily make more with electronic offerings. The bigger question is are they taking care of the authors in a similar manner?
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I disagree with some items on your list on e-books.
There will still be
cover artwork (for the ads on e-sites) or are you willing to buy from a plain square box with the title and author?
Distribution. Who runs the server farms and Web sites. That is called distribution. The product is just very light
Publishers are not normally Retailers.
Advertising (may be co-op) still needs to be done or how will the masses know the book exists (in any version)
There needs to be a middle ground in this model. Attributing all production and distribution costs again, separately is either foolishness or possible fraud.
Cover has images (possibly the same and Layout, possibly different aspect ratios. (remember those VHS boxes and DVD jewel cases for the same movie)