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Originally Posted by silvania
and you're vastly overestimating the physical costs of pbooks.
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I don't think so.
Paper costs more than recycled electrons. Ink costs more than recycled electrons. I can send 100K of data over the internet far cheaper than I can send 100 books via UPS.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silvania
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.
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Yet another reason why DRM is stupid.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silvania
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.
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That's a problem with the retailers. They should be telling the publishers to eat the cost if they demand it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silvania
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.
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Once the eBook is created, the cost of reproducing it is $0. So "economies of scale" don't even factor in. If the publisher is living in the 21th century, they should be doing everything electronically anyway - so creating that first eBook should be nearly free in the first place.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silvania
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.
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That's due to proprietary formats and DRM. Remove those and the support calls will disappear.