Quote:
Originally Posted by rlauzon
<click><click><click> There, I just produced an eBook. No cost.
I fail to see the logic. There is almost no cost to produce an eBook. Even if the sale of eBooks is 1/1000 of that of the paper book, it's almost all profit.
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There's no cost to clicking a keyboard. However, there is a cost to paying someone a full day's wage to click that keyboard. How much is your time worth? Your profit has to cover costs of employees' salaries, office space, etc... if you're a publishing house, profits are to cover the house.
Publishers figure everything against whether they will stay in business. They sell so many hardbacks at such a cost, to make Profit A. They sell paperbacks at such a cost to make Profit B. Profit A plus Profit B have to cover the costs of doing business.
If you add even one job for the express purpose of creating the e-books and maintaining the web site, your profits have to cover thet job... either Profit A, Profit B, or the profits from e-books, Profit C. If Profit C does not cover it, everyone else in the house loses profit... and decides not to spend money on something that will not profit them.
This means publishers will have to make adjustments to the way they do business, in order to add e-books to their catalogs and still make the same or better profit. When they have that figured out, e-books will start to proliferate.
Because e-books are considered low-cost
to consumers, I expect publishers to start cooking up Value-Added ideas to add to their e-books, or their services, to make them more attractive to consumers, even at higher prices. Their alternative is to further subsidize e-books with included ads for other products (the same way a DVD has ads for products and other movies added to it).
If not, they'll only see less profit, and have to deal with the realities of the changing market.