Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
P.S. Hamlet, if it costs the publisher $10 an hour to hire some college students for that 40-60 hours, that's $400-$600 to convert the book. In publishing terms, that's too small even to be pocket change. Even when you account for royalties, etc., if they're selling the book directly, they'll be turning a profit after the first couple dozen copies.
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I think you're dramatically underestimating the costs to the publisher and probably overestimating how much return they are likely to get from the ebook version (in the short term, which is all the shareholders care about).
Firstly, a publisher isn't going to hire a bored college student to do this work. Believe it or not they would hire professionals who would be getting paid a lot more than $10 per hour. On top of that hourly rate there are taxes, etc. You cost your employer a lot more than whatever your hourly rate is. And there will probably be at least 2 rounds of proofreading on the manuscript. And someone will need to format the ebook to the desired format(s) - again professionally.
I think several thousand dollars is a conservative estimate for getting a book into ebook format if the book wasn't already in electronic format.
When the publisher sells that ebook, some of the 'cover price' is going towards overheads, royalties, the retailer, etc. To recover the costs of creating an ebook they may have to sell hundreds or even thousands of copies. And ebook sales are still a tiny fraction of the book market.