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Comment by jstx | Hacker News Reader

Is this surprising when you are charged similarly for print and digital copies despite the production costs being nowhere near the same? Ebooks were supposed to be the cost effective, cut out the middlemen, pay the author directly format.

What wasn't accounted for was that the book indexers have no incentive to pass on their savings to the consumer.

edit: Let's not forget the artificial restrictions imposed by DRM, either. How difficult is it to share a digital book vs physical?

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The production costs are probably not as different as you think. The variable cost of a hardcover book is in the neighborhood of a few dollars though the exact figure depends on the size of the print run and some of the costs are buried in the cut a distributor usually takes. (As a benchmark, an author-ordered PoD copy of my ~250 page trade paperback from Createspace costs $3.75 before shipping.)

So e-books should be cheaper than physical books, all other things being equal, but the cost difference isn't as much as many assume.

Publishers aren't that forthcoming on costs, but for large-print-run, mass-market paperbacks, numbers I've heard thrown about are a cost of less than $0.50/book. So I wouldn't expect much savings from going digital. Similar situation to software: the move from boxed software to digitally delivered software didn't make it any cheaper, because the cost of the box and CD-ROM was not really a significant part of the price.

It's not just that they have no incentive to pass on the savings, they actively do not want ebooks to become popular -- they've stated this outright at various points in their battles with Amazon, that their goal with ebook pricing/policies is to preserve their print business as much as possible, as they believe that's totally key to their future success.

Yes, pretty much like Kodak, which invented the digital camera, trying to kill it off/keep it expensive so it didn't cut into film sales.

How did that work out for them?

There was an interesting comment here about Kodak several months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8978909

Yeap. DRM is the reason I don't buy e-books. When I am done with a book I want to be able to give it away or loan it out.

I have also discovered that the ebook is not fully stored on my tablet, so I can't read it offline. (Google books)

So forget e-books. If I buy a real book, I know I have the entire book!

Well, it's not surprising, but I'm not sure I agree with they psychology that ebooks should be cheaper. Pricing for books is not just a markup over marginal cost. I have this discussion every day in our office - our price is not based on our cost, our price is based on what our customer is willing to pay.

If the price of ebooks has gone up, the publishers are trying to find a balance of maximizing revenues and profit across the every distribution channel, while also taking into account any lost sales due to piracy.

Why should publishers give up rents to readers just because costs have gone down?

Presumably because if you don't, other publishers might, and they will get your customers.

For some weird reason, no publisher decided to do that. Except pirates, but they always do that.

Publishers may be okay at the moment, but I still think they're doomed. There's literally no barrier to entry in the publishing business, which is eventually going to break their pricing cartel.

As a reader without unlimited time the publishing industry acts as a barrier to entry which filters out the worst books... We need a robust reviewing system which filters out shill reviews.

You don't need a publishing industry for that; you just need book reviews.

Goodreads? And some critical reading skills to pick out the shills?

Why should I waste time on this? I know that books in the SciFi section of my local bookshop will have a certain minimum standard without needing to wade through some reviews.

You have a better local bookstore than I do. Mine is all Star Wars expanded universe dreck (last decade or so, in prequel land or tying into a children's cartoon), Star Trek fan-fiction, Halo novelizations, etc. With some classic Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Bova, and a very few other authors thrown in to class up the joint, although usually just the more well-known titles I've already read.

I'm lucky.

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