Quote:
Originally Posted by jasonkchapman
I think that's an arbitrary distinction, though, and I'm not sure how many people in the mass market care. People don't shop by production cost, they shop by perceived value. Do they insist on lower ticket prices for independent films on the grounds that they cost less to make?
|
Nope, but the analogy doesn't hold. See below.
Quote:
|
People know that the latest book by Joe Bestseller costs one heck of a lot more to bring to market than a book by Manny Midlist. Still, we don't expect Manny's books to be 1/10th the price just because he only got a $3,000 advance and no promo budget.
|
It
can't be. There will be fixed costs that will be the same for Joe Bestseller and Manny Midlist. (For a similar sized manuscript, line-editing, copy editing, proofreading, typesetting, and pre-press should be about the same.)
And printing is like any other mass production operation: there are substantial up-front costs to put something in production, but the more you make of whatever it is, the cheaper each individual one is. The incremental cost to print one more copy of something is negligible compared to the cost of setting up to print it at all. The per copy cost to the publisher on Joe Bestseller's latest tome may well be a lot lower than the cost for Manny Midlist, precisely because the upfront costs can be amortized over a much larger number of copies.
I suspect the mass market knows quite well (or will know as knowledge of ebooks spreads) that ebooks are a lot cheaper to produce than paper books, because you don't have a physical product to manufacture, warehouse, and distribute. If the ebook and the paper book cost the same, what is the incentive to buy the ebook? (Especially since you can't resell or pass along an ebook to others.)
One of the problems publishing has now is sticker shock on paper books. It will be even worse for ebooks if they try to maintain the same pricing.
______
Dennis