Quote:
Originally Posted by rlauzon
We've been through this time and time again. Do I need to go over it yet again?
The vast majority of the cost of a pBook is the physical-ness of the pBook: paper, ink, printing press, distribution, warehousing, shelf space, etc. None of those costs exist for an eBook.
[SNIP]
So, saying that the costs of an eBook is 1/4 that of a pBook is a pretty good estimate.
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You may be going over this "again", but you''re just plain incorrect. You're ignoring costs that ebooks have that pbooks do not, and you're vastly overestimating the physical costs of pbooks. DRM fees consume 10 to 15% on an ebook. That's comparable to the printing costs of a pbook. A mass market paperback, that may list for $5 to $7, costs about 50 cents to print. The same ebook will cost about 50 to 75 cents to DRM. I realize the customers don't want DRM, and by the way neither do the retailers, but the publishers require it, and they require the retailers to eat the entire cost.
Authors generally get a higher percentage of ebook sales than they do pbook sales. That eats up whatever savings there are on warehousing and transportation. ebooks are a much lower volume business right now than pbooks (by a factor of about 100). Thus they do not enjoy all kinds of economies of scale that pbooks have and overhead becomes a much larger, not smaller, percentage of the business.
And customer support is much, much higher for ebooks than pbooks. Nobody buys a print book and then sends in a trouble ticket asking how to open the book. But that happens commonly with ebooks where there is software to install, file transfers that must take place, interactions with firewalls, new software releases that contain bugs, etc.
Some of these factors will improve with increased volume and technological shake-out. But right now, there is little or no "cost" advantage for ebooks, that's just an urban legend. The advantage might amount to perhaps $1 on a $7 mass market book, at most.