Do Amazon and the Publishers want to Kill Digital Sales ?

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by gweeks

Paperbacks are significantly more expensive than general inflation. Somewhere I posted about this, but I don't remember where. I took several books from the 50's, 60's and 70's and ran the cover prices through an inflation calculator. Just given inflation a paperback should be about $5 now. I never did get to doing it for hard covers. Inflation calculators are easy to find. Plug in the year the book was published and the cover price and it spits out what today’s price would be.

Greg

I did a similar post back in 2010. Depending on when you start paperbacks are either below or at current inflation rates. The sudden jump in the late 70s accounted for the difference.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=102755

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

[Edited]

One BPH, for example, houses their datacenter in the Flatiron building in the middle of Manhattan, an iconic and very very expen$ive building to rent space in. They use it as a wiring closet.

Actually, Mamillan signed a new 10 year lease during the recession paying $30/sq ft which is cheap. They will be paying considerably more for space when they are forced to relocate assuming they stay in Manhattan.

The new owners (a European firm, I believe) of the Flatiron building submitted plans to the City to convert the building into a luxury hotel. The building is already zoned as a hotel and approved the proposal. They are waiting for Macmillan's lease to run out in 2018.

I compared office leasing rates in various cities. Detroit $18-20. Raleigh $20-25. Indianapolis $17-21. Dallas $20-35. Atlanta $23-30.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/re...Alexiou&st=cse

[Phogg]

I remember when paperback books were fifty cents and comic books were twelve cents.

[MGlitch]

Something to keep in mind with video games and movies- with video games the development curve is much newer than with books. And they started out very expensive but came down in price relative to that initial price. I think a better comparison for video games would start in the late 80s / early 90s and span through today. Keeping console and PC games in different groups.

For movies, the aim is to more than break even with box office sales. Yes that doesn't always happen, but it allows for DVD sales to be the icing on the cake. Hopefully it's the list price which is used and not various retailers prices being used since companies like Best Buy can heavily discount DVD sales. I presume this is the case, but I just want to mention it since some may not be aware.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

The calculations are interesting. I just spent some quality time with an inflation calculator myself. In general, the price increases seem to have outpaced inflation during the 80's, but have stayed below it since about 1990. The only catch is that the 80's bump was so significant that despite 25 years of lower than inflation price increases, paperback prices have still outpaced inflation overall.

The mass market price spike of the 70's and 80's was due to the older publishing houses buying up the previously independent paperback houses and raising prices to protect hardcover sales. Like they are doing today.

The price hikes in comics were different: comics used to be printed using excess newspaper capacity but as the newspaper business shrunk and consolidated most of the older, cheaper presses went away. That forced higher rates and shrunk the market which forced higher rates and new printing processes and still more hikes...

Compare the quality of paper and images in a typical floppy today with even the early "new format" and "deluxe" floppies of the early comic shop editions and the quality is entirely different. It's become very much a niche product with print runs that even in the 80's would have become unacceptable. A whole order of magnitude lower and two orders of magnitude lower than golden age peak, when (the real) CAPTAIN MARVEL sold over a million copies and more out of a weekly slate of titles.

Comics present a cautionary tale for pbooks of the slippery slope they're on.

Miind you, the comics industry itself has changed and adapted away from floppies as the cash cow, moving to original graphic novels, compilations, digital, and animation as well as IP exploitation. And the Indie side of the house has always managed to survive, if not exactly prosper. The biggest danger these days is actually the abundance of "comic book material" in both video and indie superhero fantasy ebooks.

Conceivably, the weekly floppy releases could go away and the industry would survive. Just totally unrecognizable.

[fjtorres]

Btw, if we're going to bring in how other businesses are adapting to the new digital world, this may be relevant:

http://thefutureofpublishing.com/201...hings-dilemma/

It's not just publishing that is under stress.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Miind you, the comics industry itself has changed and adapted away from floppies as the cash cow, moving to original graphic novels, compilations, digital, and animation as well as IP exploitation. And the Indie side of the house has always managed to survive, if not exactly prosper. The biggest danger these days is actually the abundance of "comic book material" in both video and indie superhero fantasy ebooks.

Conceivably, the weekly floppy releases could go away and the industry would survive. Just totally unrecognizable.

Those things are only a danger to Marvel and DC paper comics.
For readers and fans of the genre things have never been better.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Phogg

Those things are only a danger to Marvel and DC paper comics.
For readers and fans of the genre things have never been better.

I was thinking in terms of the paper format in general, not just the big boys.

Indie comics creators have flocked to digital in a variety of forms, more so than the corporate guys. From webcomics to prose ebooks to video. (You've seen CAPER on youtube, right? And everybody's seen Dr. HORRIBLE by now...)

So yes, for fans this is the golden age of golden ages.
But for print comics we are in twilight as the business transitions and evolves.

[murg]

If only a superhero would come along and save the publishing industry...

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by murg

If only a superhero would come along and save the publishing industry...

... From obsolescence?

You've been reading old issues of Stormwatch, where Warren Ellis wrote about preserving the status quo for it's own sake as being some sort of virtue.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by murg

If only a superhero would come along and save the publishing industry...

Well, they have been trying to get "Captain Anti-Trust"* involved who they think will slay the Amazon Dragon and solve all of their problems.

* Sorry. I haven't had my first coffee of the day yet so was too apathetic to think of a name with appropriate alliteration.

[murg]

Originally Posted by darryl

* Sorry. I haven't had my first coffee of the day yet so was too apathetic to think of a name with appropriate alliteration.

Admiral Arthur Arturo Author, USN (ret.), the champion of publishing.

[whismerhill]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

These seem to me to be mutually exclusive if you accept that the profit margins on ebooks versus pbooks is, relatively, narrow,

This is wrong until proven otherwise.
it's the contrary, the profit margin difference between ebook to pbook is important, definetely not "narrow".
Even with decreased cost of printing, it's still money that each copy has to pay for, ebook has no such cost. Transport is also important as well as the number of intermediaries. (hint: wholesalers, those might be skipped but not always, also depends on countries of origin & target country)

On an ebook there's only 2 actors, the publisher & the retailer. no transport, no printing cost, almost zero cost of delivery to the end user (thanks to these days price of bandwith & given the size of an ebook, the cost to download a single copy from a website is nearly zero)

My problem here is that I have no numbers for this. I do know however that a similar business (gaming) an editor actually made 10 times more money (in his pocket) from an online digital sale versus a retail sale.

[MGlitch]

For BPH's their costs are rather reduced, and they are generally smart about print runs if they get unique paper for a book. As to the material cost otherwise, remember these companies are ordering in mass bulk amounts and thus are getting discounts. Transport, while a cost, is typically pushed to the retailer. So yes it costs someone something, but not the BPHs.

Up until the book is printed, the costs are the same.

Pbooks, generally, cost more than their ebook counterparts (there are exceptions). These exceptions crop up with discounted on new physical books, or when a backlist title is made into an ebook when there was no digital file.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

url]http://thefutureofpublishing.com/2016/04/netflix-ceo-describes-publishings-dilemma/[/url]

It's not just publishing that is under stress.

The way I read your link, periodical publishing is under stress. Book publishing, not so much:

What to conclude? The news for authors and publishers is very good overall. Book sales are holding their own and the books are reaching a new generation of readers.

Originally Posted by murg

If only a superhero would come along and save the publishing industry...

What really needs a superhero to come along for is indie research-based non-fiction that matches the best of the big-five product.