Originally Posted by pilotbob
Well that's great.. but are you saying there are NO other costs involved in that? What about shipping, warehousing, returns, pulping... If you print 20,000 books and 10,000 get pulped that doubles the cost of each book you've sold. If you do a run of 20,000 and 50,000 people want to buy it you have lost out on 30,000 sales because of your poor projections. Most of those people won't come back after you've printed another run. That is opportunity cost.
Also, now consider what would the cost be of NOT printing that book. Putting it on a server somewhere that you perhaps rent for $20 a month, or pay storage/transfer fees to a service like Amazon S3. You make those files available to ebook sellers. They can sell 1 or 1000 of that book and your costs are the same.
I think to say it costs 48¢ per book is simplistic and not looking at the full business cycle.
That said, lets assume printing a book is 48¢ per unit. Lets assume doing digital only costs you 10¢. Also, lets say that you sell that book directly so your revenue is $9.99 per book rather than whatever you get wholesale for each book. Isn't that a better business model?
But, I think that the basis for alot of the complaints and miff is the fact that ebooks are selling for MORE than the price of a TBP or MMP. That certainly makes ZERO sense to any of us.
Thanks for you comments.
BOb
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