Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
But is it that simple? Remember, the online ebook sellers have to pay for the machine their website is hosted on as well as the bandwidth used by the store. Then there is paying the employees as well. Not to mention that there are employees who have to get the ebook ready once it's gone through the editing and whatnot. The ebook has to be converted into about 5-7 different formats roughly. All that costs money too. Do you think once the book is in electronic form to go to pre-press, it doesn't have any more expenses associated with it?
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Most of the above are marginal costs. The 5-7 formats are unnecessary costs.
For e-books there are 3 major natural costs, the rest are just inefficiencies:
- compensation for author
- compensation for the house (includes editing, "name of the publisher", advertising...)
- retailer cut
Since the current book business is print oriented, inefficiencies and retailer cut dominate. It is ridiculous for a retailer to take 50% of an e-book cover price for example. For print books it makes some sense, but for e-books...
The way I see it, e-books need either direct selling (maybe through a coop style arrangement, if publishers do not want to damage their relations with the big retailers their print business depends on), or an e-book tailored retailer or two, that take a much smaller cut of the smaller cover price, but have enough volume to make tons of money...
So we have circularity: low volume - high prices/high retailer cut - low volume
Something needs to break here, my big hopes have been resting on Google and digitization or Amazon and Kindle, since I do not see piracy as powerful enough to force the business into change...