Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Movies, even direct-to-vid movies, get a lot more viewers than books get readers. (A movie is a 2-hour time investment towards entertainment; a book is longer than that for everyone except bibliphile speed-readers.) And I think that's an area where production cost of the individual units *does* matter. For all the hype about books only costing a couple of dollars to print (and distribute and store, which is a lot of where I question the claims), discs cost *pennies* to produce. Even good-quality DVDs, bought by the case (truckload) are very cheap, and so are the packing materials. The color picture on the outside of the box is probably the most expensive part of a DVD.
Movie sales are measured in the millions. Book sales are measured in the thousands. DVDs take less storage space and less display space to advertise.
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Very interesting exchange, and dead on. There's an additional aspect that I missed, if it was addressed, and that's the effect of a critical mass of consumers. A theatrical movie or a best seller are aimed at the entire community, at getting the "have you seen/read" factor going quickly so the sales can explode in the first couple of weeks. Since reorders on the part of book stores are all keyed to the first week sales, this is crucial in the shelf life-span of a given title.
Most books that are different from the current best seller model depend on good old word of mouth, i.e. individuals recommending books to their friends. This means that such books must remain available to allow time for this much more intimate exchange to take place. Back when backlist could be warehoused for years, this wasn't a problem. Writers with a different voice could build a readership slowly but surely. A new book would come out and the publisher could offer the entire backlist.
Thanks to the Thor-tool decision, those warehoused books became taxable items not just in the first year of production but for every subsequent year. This shifted the entire dynamic of book publishing. It became economically unfeasible for meaningful numbers of backlist to be kept available. Every time a new book in a series came out, they had to reprint the entire backlist...only to trash the unsold copies before the end of the year. The number printed was therefore kept at a bare minimum.
This was particularly disastrous for SF/F which depend heavily on series and backlist, thanks to the world building inherent to the genre, which eats up a lot of wordage. But all non-bestseller books are directly affected by a decision that turned books into cans of tomatoes.
So those costs of shipping and warehousing that you question probably reflect this necessary tax.