01-30-2020, 10:34 AM | #181 |
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If anything, physical gets more expensive with volume because of warehousing and returns.
That's why tradpub has been reducing initial print runs and supplementing with POD on everything but the big names. The upfront cost is nowhere near as big and overhead and recurring costs are a much bigger part of print than they like to pretend. Other content businesses welcome digital because of the higher profit margins, even at lower retail (which actually boosts consumption as a bonus) but publishing is special... Last edited by fjtorres; 01-30-2020 at 10:39 AM. |
01-30-2020, 10:34 AM | #182 | |
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The cost of warehouse and shipping can exceed print. Even print is only down to maybe 50c in 100,000 quantity, that's a $50,000 upfront cost. The cost of Amazon listing and shipping ebooks via user Internet connection is almost zero compared to total IT / AWS costs. They DO charge the publisher for Mobile Whispernet delivery, which is tiny compared to physical shipping. |
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01-30-2020, 10:49 AM | #183 | |||
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https://www.investopedia.com/ask/ans...ail-sector.asp Quote:
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AWS has been reported as 25% profit margin but it is going higher as they boost their database, graphics and AI services. So 10x higher. Tradpub is also low margin, typically in the 5-7%, even with maybe 25% unit sales coming from digital and audio. Last edited by fjtorres; 01-30-2020 at 10:56 AM. |
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01-30-2020, 12:41 PM | #184 | |
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Yea, it only cost a couple of cents to jump in the car and drive to the store, but that ignores the actual expense of owning a car - car payments, insurance, maintenance - it's not just the gas to get you from point A to point B. Data centers are the same way. Sure the data storage used for an eBook is trivial, but actual data centers, with electricity, purchased hardware, purchased bandwidth, personal and the like costs a lot of money on an on going basis. |
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01-30-2020, 12:48 PM | #185 | |
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01-30-2020, 01:21 PM | #186 | |
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Market share matters. Setting up a brand new eBook business would be very costly, because you would need almost as much infrastructure for a small small market share as for Amazon's huge one. So your cost per book would be much higher. Again, it scales well. And Amazon already has all the hardware in place for its other operations. If it were to stop selling eBooks right now, but keep all the rest of its businesses going, how much cost would that save? Not much. You've already got the car and are making hand over fist with high end limo service. You make a bit more doing uber eats on the side. |
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01-30-2020, 01:34 PM | #187 | |
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They have a higher ceiling than any startup because they are already a going concern making fifty to a hundred million a year net. That is one very useful starting point. Last edited by fjtorres; 01-30-2020 at 01:38 PM. |
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01-30-2020, 01:39 PM | #188 |
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Besides, isn't this all irrelevant?
Under Agency, it doesn't matter to the publishers what the costs of supplying eBooks, because that comes out of the retailer's 30%. The publishers get 70% of cover regardless. How does that compare to what they get from a pBook after the retailer's cut and the cost of printing and distribution? |
01-30-2020, 02:51 PM | #189 | |
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The author gets 25% or $2.91. On print they get 35-45% of list (authors get from 8-15%) which is typically around double the ebook retail. So on a $24 pbook they get about $9 gross, the author gets $3, and the rest is split between the distributor (Ingram only, since B&T quit) and the retailer. Amazon rarely uses Ingram as a distributor and picks up the books at the publisher warehouse so they eat the shipping but get the max 45% discount. Of their gross, publishers have to pay printing, shipping to their warehouses, warehousing, shipping on returns, and pulping costs. Plus overhead, but that applies to ebooks, too. Before Agency, ebooks sold at the same price as print so publishers got $9 instead of $6.84 and authors got $3 instead instead of $2.90. Of course, some pbooks have higher lists and others lower. But the ratios are mostly contant. With one exception: deep discount deals, like Costco gets. On those, they get 50% but instead of paying the author 15% of list, they pay out around 5% of the 50%. So on a $24 book selling for $15 at Costco, Costco makes $3, the publisher $11.40 and the $0.60%. It's a weird business. Last edited by fjtorres; 01-30-2020 at 02:55 PM. |
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01-30-2020, 03:28 PM | #190 | |
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I didn't say Amazon ran its own operations on AWS. I said that it made so much money from AWS that the profitability of its other ventures was largely irrelevant. That is a matter of public record |
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01-30-2020, 05:10 PM | #191 | |
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The main connection is that tbe first AWS customers were using excess Amazon capacity and tbe first AWS data centers used tech developed For Amazon inhouse use. Both things have changed. By now (probably since they starting publicly separating AWS income) the two operations have strongly diverged. AWS still does basic infrastructure cloud business but they've evolved way past that. Aws is moving into IP territory for businesses Amazon doesn't play in and software they don't use, and even designing its own CPUs and GPUs and AI chips. Daddy Bezos' baby is growing up fast. Last edited by fjtorres; 01-30-2020 at 05:12 PM. |
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01-30-2020, 07:58 PM | #192 | |
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01-30-2020, 08:34 PM | #193 | |
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Most of the ones I found were in non-english languages. From my phones. There were hundreds. But now Play app listings are showing up as georestricted in the browser so they might not show up in the US. The ones I saw were in arabic, korean, chinese (no surprise there) and spanish and offered up anything from 1 book to dozens at too good to be true prices. Google search won't display any of the articles about it from years back so they may have cleaned up recently or swept it under the rug. It was after the time of the Digital Reader articles on pirate epubs on Play. Apparently the scammers moved from epub to appbooks. |
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