With Books basically this Expensive, can even Ebook Publishing Save Books?
What does it cost at any average bookstore to buy any average hardcover book - about $25? If you bought such an average book in e-book form, a form that doesn't require any printing or material costs, or transportation, handling or storage expenses to the publisher, you would expect to have to pay a lot less, wouldn't you? The publisher can't really charge you for these expenses when they no longer exist? So what kind of savings would you expect, $20 off? If you ask anyone, they do expect something like this and feel it is gross injustice that publishers only knock $10 or so off the cover price if you buy the e-book version of anything. Are the ebook publishing companies just greedily unwilling to let go of all the cash they have been able to charge all these years? Lots of people really suspect that. But it would appear, as usual, that the view of the general public of how a "business" operates, is quite distorted.
The cost of printing, stocking and transporting a paper book, isn't as high as you would think it was. On a $20 hardcover, the bookseller and the publisher split it evenly. The publisher will need to pay the author about $3, advertise the book, and pay for the whole publishing machinery - editors, managers, book cover designers and so on. The actual cost of printing and handling a physical book may be no higher than 50 cents apiece. And anyway, there is no such thing as an all ebook publishing company. Everyone mostly sells physical books, and only a a few early converts actually download e-books. The publishers haven't really started seeing any of those generous 50-cent savings yet.
But if you ask me, they have to just bring down the prices of all books, to something no higher than $5. Why do books have to be as expensive as $25 each anyway? You do see how people are just passing on magazines and newspapers now, because of how expensive they are. Even the middle-class American doesn't put down $25 for a book on a whim. Surely, in somewhat less well-off countries, the very concept of a bookshop never took off, and never will? There is quite a demand the world over for cheap books as entire new societies become better-educated. How can any kind of publishing take advantage of those markets with prices like these? What we had low-cost student editions books do for the market before, ebook publishing will do today.
Publishers just hate to see the prices of their products become a shadow of their former selves. But in an age of free entertainment all over, they had better move over quickly to cheap ebook publishing, before they lose their market altogether.