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
Business is going to business.
It’s hard to know how much a company saves on distribution. There are still costs associated with making a digital book. Often, the layout can’t be identical to what would be done for a physical book, especially for books with diagrams and complex figures that will have to account for e-readers with sizes from “phone” to “tablet”.
There’s also market forces. When Amazon prices e-books at the same price as print books, people don’t stop buying e-books. That means Amazon has no real incentive to lower the prices. People would probably complain, but STILL buy e-books if they were MORE expensive. That technically means Amazon is setting the wrong price. The market only cares about profit.
How it affects royalties really comes down to the author’s contract. Digital books might have different conditions than print books. Unless the author is very popular, they don’t get a lot of say and contracts usually favor the publisher and distributor. So I bet it’s common that even if the costs of distributing e-books are less, it’s reflected in authors having a smaller royalty percentage for that revenue. (But most authors don’t get royalties at all.)
Latest Answers