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Comment by tux3 | Hacker News Reader

Love the price transparency, the obvious followup question is where the other ~85% of the pie goes when I buy a ~50€ paper book, if the author only earns a little under 15%?

I imagine printing will be about 2 to 5€, if it's not ultra cheap print on demand refuse. Is the rest all for publishers and Amazon dot com?

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Following up with actual numbers for the project, from Lulu, in Euros: List Price 43 Print cost 11 Distribution fees (read: Amazon, 50% of selling price): 21.5 Lulu share of profit : 2 Rest to author: 8,5

Because of the different prices on different locales in different currencies the actual share I receive averages 7€ (gross revenue before income tax, although in my case the yearly income is too small to trigger it where I live).

For books sold directly on Lulu List price 43 Print cost 11 Lulu share of profit: 6.5 Rest to author: 25.5

The mindset should not be "this is all that’s left for me", however: a book is many things at once and for better or for worse, Amazon creates a big part of it. Kevin kelly has some excellent advice at https://kk.org/thetechnium/everything-i-know-about-self-publ...

Amazon takes the lion’s share, and then the rest of the pie looks very different depending on which route you go. Big publishers print in batches and have very low print/distribution costs. I ended up on the other end of the spectrum, self-publishing with Lulu (print-on-demand, so much higher costs). I wrote an article in French on exploring the economics of textbooks, from the open-source point of view, a few years back: https://framablog.org/2022/01/20/mais-ou-sont-les-livres-uni...

When selling a product through a reseller, the markup is around 80-100%. I was horrified by this in the 80s, but soon learned that the resellers would be out of business otherwise.

The reason resellers exist is they do the marketing, warehousing, shipping, customer service, etc.

Thanks, I enjoyed the article. I've bought a couple creative commons books (PDF and printed), both to have the physical artifact and to send gratitude to the author, in a form that unambiguously means something. I rarely see a pay-what-you-want option, but that would make sense to me. Buying a free PDF isn't really like buying an apple or a manufactured good, it feels more like buying music on Bandcamp. It costs nothing to copy a file, but I still want to send what I can.

Sadly I haven't been very satisfied with print on demand books. It can be serviceable for textbooks, it does make prints a lot more accessible, but the quality has been pretty disappointing for me. When I buy a POD I often end up reading the PDF instead, which seems a bit wasteful.

> I wrote an article in French on exploring the economics of textbooks, from the open-source point of view, a few years back

Thanks for that, it’s very informative. I contemplated publishing a book that way and never actually got that far into the planning phase. Do you think things have changed much since then?

I have not kept a very close look on what’s going on. I would say that three things have changed since:

- tablets are everywhere in the classrooms now, so the number of places where a good PDF can do good is much bigger

- there are better workflows to get a high-quality PDF than LaTeX, so much frustration can be saved, and all that can be learned easily with AI tools

- in a sea of AI slop, all the humans are desperate for a One Good Resource they can trust

Go for it!!!!

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