Ebooks have reignited the question of what we're really paying publishers for – the physical product, or what's written inside?
From a piece in the Guardian...
When you shell out £25 or £30 for a hardback, what exactly are you paying for? I have always assumed – like, I imagine, most people – that the high cost of hardbacks is down to the fact that they are much more expensive than paperbacks to produce. But in fact this isn't the case at all. They are more expensive, true, but only slightly more – certainly not nearly enough to account for the £10 or £15 difference that has traditionally existed between the two formats.
In his forthcoming book Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back, the American author Robert Levine has an excellent chapter on publishing in which he interrogates the forces driving the pricing of books, in both their paper and digital forms. And some of the explanations he gives are (to me at least) surprising. For example, it turns out that "publishers only spend $3.50 to print and distribute a hardback". (Let's say it's £3 in Britain.) So when, this autumn, you go into your local bookshop and spend £30 on that gorgeous copy of Claire Tomalin's long-awaited Dickens biography, you really are just putting a large amount of profit into the hands of her publisher, with some knocked off for the retailer. Right?
Well, yes and no.
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