Eli5: Why is the purchase price of e-books basically the same as print.

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I would expect e-books to be considerably cheaper than printed books, since there are reduced distribution and production costs. Yet the retail price often doesn’t match those savings versus an e-book. I would hope that the authors royalties would reflect some of the savings in production costs.

In: Economics

16 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because there’s more costs than just printing the book. You have to pay all the people that went into making a book. The author might have spent hundreds or thousands of hours on their work. If you are able to get published through one of the large publishing companies, they’ll have teams of editors, illustrators, sales, marketing, distribution, all the things needed to get your book into Barnes and Noble or Amazon.

As for the cost of printing a book, these companies have contracts with massive printers where they turn out 100,000 books for less than you self-publishing 1,000.

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