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Comment by JosNun | Hacker News Reader

My question is, where do people buy epubs for these? Are you buying them off of Kindle or similar and stripping the DRM? My biggest withholding is that I can get used paper books for quite cheep (ie, from thriftbooks or similar), but there's not really a similar marketplace for digital versions (understandably so). Maybe I'm just cheap, but I have a hard time justifying near-full-price for books that I can get the physical version for much cheaper, or I already have sitting on my shelf at home.

Any thoughts?

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https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/ Is an option

That eBooks don't need printing, warehousing, distribution and retail shelving, it's quite galling that the price isn't favorably differentiated. And I don't think the author gets to keep the difference.

> eBooks don't need printing, warehousing, distribution and retail shelving

But they do need editing, layout, design, marketing, etc, which are a significant part of the cost of a book. A book is never a solo endeavor by an author.

Presumably, though, those are also things that you'd need for a physical print book, and you could share some of that effort / cost between the two? Maybe this is a naive assumption, but I would assume that the total cost per unit of ebook is still a decent amount less than a print book, even when factoring for the publishing costs, purely due to the fact that you are dealing with a digital version compared with a print version that needs real materials and labor.

You put it well and presbyterian is right in that point, but eBooks don't have the financial risk of retail merchandise planning and merchandising, and that cost saving isn't differentiated.

Much of the cost of even a print book is in fixed factors: authorship, editing, proofreading, marketing, cover design, and the like. These may vary by title and it's quite possible to skimp on elements, but for a highly-produced work (references, fact-checking, illustrations, data tables, etc.) can be significant. Those costs are amortised over the print run and sales, which for most books is quite small, perhaps a few thousands of copies.

Digital publishing bypasses print, distribution, warehousing, and materials, but still includes those fixed costs.

Keep in mind that many publishers effectively act a bit like investors or VC, seeding a large number of publications in the hopes that a small number succeed. The name "Random House" was said by its founding publisher, Bennet Cerf to be "We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random". As in music and cinema, a few "tentpole" projects support much of the rest of the enterprise.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_House#Company_history>.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tentpole>

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