Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
shipping, warehousing, dealing with returns, etc. A bit of quick addition gives $4.00 in costs for a paperback that are not going to be present for an ebook.
I've also noted quite a few ebooks that are priced higher than the paperback version -- care to try to explain the costs of production rationale for that?
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I don't know how books are taxed where you live, but here in The Netherlands books are taxed with 6% VAT + further subsidized with special regulations. ebooks fall under regular consumer goods, and are taxed 21%
Website design and maintenance also cost a fortune and dealing with returns don't differ from physical books. On the contrary, ebooks cost a lot more in customer care simply because a lot of people have a hard time understanding how "the internet" and computers in general work. Also, they feel less of a threshold to ask for help or to shove away their responsibility.
It is not as simple as putting an ebook on a website and you're done like if you're uploading something on Mobileread.
You need to develop a solid, reliable environment which renders well on everything from the smallest phone and browsers from a decade ago to a modern desktop monitor, without a single hitch or glitch. Then you have to triple-check if personal data is secure, nobody can't access something they haven't paid for, DRM is solid and in place (without denying actual paying customers, and without them having an overly big threshold to use the system). Then you have to research how the best way is to design the website and what customers want (which genres to show, which books to show, avoid words with more than one syllable etc...). After that, you start with designing the environment for analytical data and cookies, which requires even more outside experts. You also have to adapt everything to internet legislation, and legislation for multiple countries. You must ensure that people can use multiple payment methods, which cost money as well.
A lot more go into it than renting some storage, hiring people on minimum wage (and below) and putting a stamp on it.