Comments on: Amazon vs Macmillan = Big River Fighting to be Big Banana

By: John Brown

John Brown — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:37:49 +0000

Good comments.

By: bdayton

bdayton — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:38:22 +0000

Awesome work, John! One of the best blogs I’ve seen about it. I’ve been keeping track of you and Tobias Buckell’s as well.

One thing that I’m so amazed about it how everyone is talking about the new Ipad and how it’s going to be a big player in the market. I’m sure it will be, since Apple could put its logo on a rock and sell it for $400, but it makes me chuckle. Do these people not understand that it doesn’t have an e-ink screen? The eyestrain that they don’t like from their computer is going to be exactly the same on the Ipad. Not to mention the crippling lack of features for something so expensive. I do a complete rundown of it on my blog. http://bryceandliz.tumblr.com/post/357536949/all-right-just-a-quick-note-to-remind-everyone

By: John Brown

John Brown — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:12:57 +0000

I think those are all good questions. I’ll try to answer as best I can and put it in the original post.

Does that answer the question?

By: jason_young

jason_young — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:47:23 +0000

I have been following this blog as well as some others on this whole issue, and the general consensus is that the paper/shipping/binding/whatever is only about 20% of the total cost of the book, making the cost of an ebook about $20.
So I have a question/comment.
This would only be true if the publisher is only putting out ebooks. Otherwise this cost has already been figured into the run of the physical books, right?
A few years ago ebooks were almost unheard of, so the publisher would not have been trying to defray the cost of publishing the book with ebook sales, so in essence, it was almost free (except for the $20 to your kid to convert it to the ebook format) to create an ebook.
Now, with ebooks becoming much more popular, the publishers are trying to use ebook sales to help pay for the cost of producing the book. Fine, but since they now have 3 market segments (ebook, hard cover, paperback) instead of 2 (hard cover, paperback) shouldn’t we see a decrease in the hard back/paperback price? I think so, otherwise the arguments of how much it costs to produce a book vs how many books they have to sell, becomes a bunch of bunk.
Figuring that the cost of hard cover and paperback books have not come down in the last few years as ebooks have become more popular, I can only assume that the production costs of the books is still figured into the physical books. This means that the ebooks are almost complete profit (minus the format conversion costs) for the publisher and for the retailer (server space costs much less that physical storage space).
I hope this comment makes sense as it turned out much longer than I originally intended and I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

By: DanDanTheArtMan

DanDanTheArtMan — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:54:40 +0000

Wow John, great article! Thank you very much for posting all of this awesome information, very well done. I think it’s so great I linked to it in my own blog post, “eBoook Prices” found here: http://writingsofdan.blogspot.com/

Thanks for the great post!