Of Amazon and eBooks

Not as much as you think: writers still need editors. They still need someone to help them market their books, since every minute not spent writing is a minute not spent honing their craft. Merely saying "get a blog" isn't enough. They still need to be able to eat. And so on. A lot of these analyses have been busily pointing out physical costs account for a relatively small proportion of the overall cost of a book.

In addition, you, the reader, still needs someone to help you sort through the vast amount of stuff out there that you could read. Publishers, for all their other ills, help do this to some extent, despite all the false positives and false negatives that get through (or don't).

Electronic publishing might eventually become "a completely different cost paradigm," but it sure isn't there yet.

You miss my point entirely. When calculating the cost to manufacture a book, you don't do it as a percentage of the list price. In fact, for a $40 best seller, I'm betting it's the inverse, as the volume for those go up, the printing price drops down to the order of $1.50 - $2.

What I was trying to emphasize, is that unlike most goods and products, that have their final cost as a markup to the physical cost, Books are more like software - the actual manufacturing cost doesn't play much of a role in the list price.

So, to say that "Average cost of manufacturing a book is 10% of list" is to imply that there is a relationship between list price and manufacturing cost of a book.

Whether, in the end, it turns out be 10% or 15% or 5% as an "average" is mostly irrelevant to the core of our discussion, which is "eBook Pricing versus Physical Book Pricing".

This is _particularly_ important with regards to the conversation at hand, as the Publishers are mostly focused on the final retail price being charged to the customer, and probably aren't that excited about whether it comes from an eBook or Hardcover. This is counter-intuitive to most people who thing _OF COURSE_ a publisher would rather get $10 for an eBook (With DRM, non copyable, non-lendable, close to zero manufacturing /shipping costs, fewer returns) versus a HardCover book, and all the costs associated with it.

What I'm trying to highlight is that, at the end of the day, the List Price <-> Manufacturing Cost relationship is not as straightforward as "Printing Cost is 10% of list price"

Of a few sources for the clearest figures, most appeared to be quoting from this, and not self-pub figures like the OP of this thread.

Here's the best written I could find: http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost...

List price = MSRP/Cover Price.

If John Grisham has 10% printing costs, I think everyone else is likely to. The problem with extrapolating from self-pub figures is that these companies make money off of printing. Publishers don't make a penny off of printing, they make their money once pre-production and marketing has been paid off.

Of course every book is unique, some writers are awful and need more editing, others are brilliant and need none. Colour pages drive up prices ridiculously and non-fiction books are not priced like fiction, which is the major debate piece on the eBook front, discussing non-fiction is rather irrelevant as prices are based on work regardless of cost, plus they need to pay off expenses fast due to far lower sale volumes.

Printing is 10% of cover price, distribution is 10% of cover price (this I believe includes the cost of returning too). For a hardcover this can total $8, for a mass market paperback this can be $1. Amazon, lik

I didn't get into a discussion of benefits of eBooks, especially when colour e-ink readers arrive. Specifically comics and graphic novels would likely fare excellently, low editing costs (almost all the work is done by the author art, inking, and minor amounts of writing), virtually no marketing or advertising costs make printing (higher than a simple black-ink book) and distribution the major costs. It could literally be back to $0.99 comic books. Printing in comics can be up to 40% of cover price, distribution taking 30%, which compared to a book is killer.

I have no intention to say eBooks aren't going to become huge one day, but many of the costs in book making are from well before the ink hits paper. Unless you're willing to sacrifice quality, the prices are going to remain very close.