Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
The price of reading on paper in Dutch is just... overdone. I could imagine buying the Dutch e-book for a premium of €7.46 over the English version if you really want to read in Dutch, but paying an EXTRA €40 on top of that just to read on paper is, IMHO, needlessly expensive.
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I fear it's not that simple. There was a book conference in the Baltic a few years back focusing on the problems of small language markets.
Problem one is that most of the costs of publishing a book occur before the book is actually published, in print or electronic form. Dropping the print edition provides nowhere near the cost savings most folks think, and won't drop the price of the book as much as people hope. (An editor friend commented elsewhere that the Print/Bind/Warehouse/Distribute portion was about
10% of the average book's budget.)
Problem two is that publishers must cover their costs and actually make money. The price of a book reflects that effort.
Problem three is the "small language market" mentioned above. Publishers in small language markets have a triple whammy.
The first is that the total size of the market is small. (There are countries where the entire literate population is less than that of the metropolitan area of the US where I live.)
The second is that the total costs are spread over a much smaller number of units, and prices must be high to cover the costs.
The third is that many of the literate adult readers in those countries also read English. Why bother with a publication in their native language if they can get the book in English from a foreign publisher for a lot less than they'd pay for it in their native language?
(And many of the books in question are international best sellers written in English, and producing a native language version requires the additional costs of creating a translation.)
And thinking about it, add a fourth whammy:
no book will appeal the the
entire market. Each book has a
potential market that is a subset of the total market, and will not be bought by the entire subset. The smaller the potential market, the worse the problems of covering cost become.
If you insist on reading in Dutch, prices will be high in print or electronic version, simply because the market for books in Dutch is small, and the price per copy must be higher because less copies will be sold to cover the costs.
Similar comments apply to small markets, period. You'll see unhappiness expressed by Australians at what books cost there. The population is about 25 million, somewhat above the 17 million of the Netherlands. Its simplified a bit because English is the dominant tongue and most folks speaking a different native language are bi-lingual, but an Australian publisher will still sell less copies of a book, with higher costs per copy in consequence.
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Dennis