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That price at retail requires a fairly large print run (probably tens of thousands) and economical overhead and distribution. The major contributor to the cost is not the dimensions of the book (page size), it is economies of scale. POD of course has no economies of scale--not for the book production itself. (And if sales were to be large enough for other economies of scale to kick in, than POD would make no sense and standard printing methods would be appropriate.). . . I just wanted a regular sized paperback book priced at about $7.99 or less, not a huge trade paperback (not quite the size of hardcover). . . .
That is why no commercial publisher that has to price books for the market can publish books that will not sell at least several thousand copies in fairly short order through established channels. And at that, print runs of only several thousand have to be balanced by books with print runs and sales in the many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Although the numbers are of course long outdated, some will find of interest the table "Economies of Scale in Book Production" on p. 48 of Curtis G. Benjamin's A Candid Critique of Book PUblishing (Bowker, 1977). The picture painted by the table should still be reasonably representative. (Benjamin was a top executive of a prominent publisher, McGraw-Hill.) Anyway, in his example, average price per copy (remember, these are 1977 figures), declines from $11.30 for a print run of 1,000 copies to $1.15 for a print run of 25,000 copies (with the rate of decline tapering off after that, the figure falling to $0.77 per copy for print run of 100,000).
BTW, according to Benjamin (p. 49), "the average first printing [for McGraw-Hill] is currently [circa 1977] about 9,000 copies. while the median size is about 5,000 copies." I suspect that those figures are still reasonably typical, although numbers might have moved up a bit and would vary a lot depending on genre and publisher.
FWIW.
--Ken
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