Reader devices [LWN.net]

Reader devices

Posted Aug 2, 2012 22:18 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Reader devices by dlang
Parent article: The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

The savings to the publisher in not having to print, store, ship physical books will eventually make a significant difference to the price of e-books vs paper books.

All of those costs come to less than 15% of the price of a paperback. The majority of the cost to the publisher is editing, proofing, and advances, all of which are committed before the book hits the shelves and none of which are affected by e-books (modulo the regrettable tendency for e-books to be 'published' with no editing at all).

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Reader devices

Posted Aug 2, 2012 22:30 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

> All of those costs come to less than 15% of the price of a paperback

Bzzz, the retail markup itself is normally around 50% of the cover price of the book. These other costs may be 'only' 15% of the cover price, but that would mean that a direct-from-publisher e-book has avoided almost 65% of the costs for that copy.

but even if you were right, that's still not an excuse for the e-books costing MORE than the paper versions.

Reader devices

Posted Aug 4, 2012 11:40 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Bzzz, the retail markup itself is normally around 50% of the cover price of the book.

The figures I've seen suggest 30% each for distributor and retailer.

but even if you were right, that's still not an excuse for the e-books costing MORE than the paper versions.

True enough -- at least if by 'the paper version' you mean the hardback. Not all books sell well enough to come out in paperback: the publisher relies on the high price of the hardbacks to make back their costs (at least UK publishers do and I can't imagine it's significantly different in the US). Small- or slow-selling books, including a lot of technical works, can be expected to remain quite costly even in ebook form.

Reader devices

Posted Aug 4, 2012 22:03 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

I'm not saying that all e-books should sell for $6 or something like that. I've happily paid $70 for a technical e-book where the paper copy was $100.

But when the e-book costs more than the hardcover (when it's released) and more than the paperback (when it's released), the publisher is just gouging the purchaser.

> The figures I've seen suggest 30% each for distributor and retailer.

If you have publisher, distributor and retailer that's actually worse than the 50% I was thinking.

something to keep in mind, When Amazon started selling e-books they were paying the person who listed the book 35% of the purchase price (i.e. Amazon was keeping 65% of the purchase price) and nobody was screaming about Amazon gouging the publishers, it was in the range they expected. It was big news when Amazon started offering an option to give the person who listed the book 70% of the purchase price.

Note that when publishers list books for $12.99 or $14.99 they (and therefor the author) get paid significantly less than if they listed the book for $9.99, but many of them insist on continuing to do so.

Any publisher could start selling e-books directly from their own website, and the costs of doing so would be significantly lower than the cost of selling through Amazon. This works even for customers with Kindles or Nooks. Baen books does this, others could as well.

Apple forbids the publisher from doing this inside apps for their products, but I'll bet publishers could get convince them to alter their policies if they really wanted to.