The State of Publishing: AMZN v. AAPL
This is a great article from The New Yorker called Publish or Perish.
It discusses the e-book business and the iPad and Kindle, the latter of which I own. All of the books I review are sent to me for free and I usually give them away once I’m done with them.
Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price. On a twenty-six-dollar book, the publisher receives thirteen dollars, out of which it pays all the costs of making the book. The author gets $3.90 in royalties. Bookstores return about forty per cent of the hardcovers they buy; this accounts for $5.20 per book. Another $3 goes to overhead costs and the price of producing and shipping the book—leaving, in the best case, about a dollar of profit per book.
Why, Mossberg asked, should consumers “pay Apple $14.99 when they can buy the same book from Amazon for $9.99?”
“That won’t be the case,” Jobs said, seeming implacably confident.
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