The cost of books

[delkytlar]

Over on barbarienne's LJ, she's posted about a cadre of Kindle owners who are making claims that the big publishers don't want ebooks to succeed as a viable format for reading.  I leave it in her capable hands to debunk that nonsense.  However, one comment that I read there, and have seen elsewhere, drives me insane.

The comment is that "printing makes up

Comments

[robotech_master]

Then how is Baen able to sell the e-books of its brand new hardcovers at $6 each or less? (With no DRM, to boot.) And, according to Eric Flint, make a profit by doing so, and pay authors better e-royalties than most other places?

(Granted, they also sell E-ARCs at $15 each for three months before the release of each book-but other publishers only sell e-books starting at book release, so that would be comparing apples and oranges. But even then, $15 is a lot less than hardcover price.)

Nobody who complains about how printing costs make up only $2 out of the price of a $26 hardcover ever seems to want to address that.

[delkytlar]

Baen makes it up through the print editions and those over-priced E-ARCs (yes, I think paying $15 for an advance uncorrected galley is too much). Eric and Baen are very clear that their free and low-cost ebooks are seen as an adjunct or promotion for their print publishing program. They are not intended to be complete substitutes for the sale of printed copies

[robotech_master]

I haven't seen any actual numbers to back up the claims of costs listed in the post above.

And, just about every person that I've talked to in publishing about this subject before this Macmillan/Amazon thing has said that printing, paper and ink are the major cost of a book.

Now they're all telling me that the largest cost is editorial.

I just want to see numbers at this point.

[delkytlar]

There is a short-form estimate in one of my other comments here. However, I did not say that the largest cost is editorial - I said that it is overhead. That is: Editorial, Legal, Sales, Marketing, Operations as well as Production (which does not go away just because publication becomes entirely electronic). And, what we call Author Expense (the money we pay to authors to cause them to allow us to publish their work).

Better numbers, I can't provide. But then, Chrysler has never justified the underlying costs of my minivan to me. Nor Disney the underlying costs of my admission ticket to DisneyWorld. I have to take it on faith that the experience and functionality of those purchases is worth the cover price. I can only ballpark figures, and give an overview of underlying costs that too many people think we can do without.

[delkytlar]

Some information about printing and binding costs from an editor can be found in comments at Jay Lake's post on this topic.

http://jaylake.livejournal.com/2056406.html?view=14636246