Taking some time off from changing links to Amazon into links to Barnes&Noble and Powell's, to respond to Brian's foolishness.
Well, a claim that something is "irrelevant" would be stronger for some reasoning behind it. If it really were "irrelevant" then I submit that mass paperbacks would price the same as hardcopy.
You probably meant "hardcover," but your problem is still the same: Paperbacks sell many times more copies than hardcovers. That's a fact that you're still ignoring. If we take total numbers of sales into account, e-books should sell for
more than hardcovers.
The cost of reproduction of an individual e-book is still irrelevant.
James, here are the two points that I raised with Medievalist that really need answering, and they got lost in the noise perhaps.
They've been answered many times, before you even posted them, but go ahead anyway.
"In fact, you presented something in your previous post at the very beginning that undercuts the entire argument: the $2 per volume cost of a mass-distribution paperback. The retail price of a mass-distribution paperback runs between $6 and $10 these days. Yet all of those costs you mentioned as being the same for e-books as for hardcovers are also the same for paperbacks. The big publishing houses are claiming that they cannot sell e-books for $9.99 profitably, but they DO sell mass-distribution paperbacks (which, although cheaper to produce than hardcovers, are more expensive to produce than e-books) for that much or less. Are you going to claim that they are not making a profit on sale of paperbacks?"
No, she's not going to claim that they aren't making a profit on paperbacks. The number of paperbacks sold dwarfs the number of hardcovers sold, which in turn dwarfs the number of e-books sold.
You're also assuming that the cost per unit of e-books is a lot lower than $2.00/each. Do you have anything to back that up?
To make this simple enough for you to understand: If they make one penny of profit on each paperback, and they sell 100,000 paperbacks, they've made $1,000. But to make that same $1,000 on 10,000 hardcovers sold, the hardcover would have to go for ten cents more than the paperback (assuming cost of production was equal). And to make the same $1,000 on 100 e-books sold, they'd have to charge ten dollars
more than the paperback. Understand now?
And:
"First, if Macmillan is issuing some e-books priced at $5.99, clearly the claim that they cannot make a profit issuing them at $9.99 is untrue.
Once they've paid back the sunk costs, the costs of acquisition, editing, fact checking, copy editing, proofreading, and typesetting ... yes, they can charge less. Your point is utterly bogus. The $5.99 books will come long after the hardcover and the paperback hit the stores.
"Second, if they are pricing the books from $12.99 up "at first release, concurrent with a hardcover," the obvious reason why they are doing so is to avoid competition between their two products. The same reason why some other publishing houses are delaying e-book issuance for some months after issuing the hardcover (although evidently Macmillan isn't one of those). It has nothing to do with the cost of production of the e-book, and to suggest that it does is disingenuous. Both the pricing of paperbacks, and the lower-end pricing of e-books issued by publishing houses, prove that what you're saying about cost of production and pricing necessity is untrue.
No one has claimed it has to do with the cost of e-book production. It has to do with the cost of all production. You're also confusing (again) paperbacks with e-books. They aren't equivalent in terms of volume of sales.
"It could not be more obvious that publishers CAN sell e-books profitably for a good deal LESS than the $9.99 ceiling Amazon imposes. They just don't want to."
If you're willing to wait a few years after initial publication, and accept that the cost of e-book conversion will have to be divided among a lower number of actual sales, then you'll see cheaper e-books.
Care to take a stab at answering those two points?
Done.
Now I'm off to remove some more links to Amazon.
