[JosNun]

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?

[thatmiddleway]

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

[ptaffs]

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.

[dredmorbius]

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>

[presbyterian]

> 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.

[JosNun]

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.

[ptaffs]

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.