The Latest in Books, eBooks, and Audiobooks.
Free Preview:
James Patterson’s successful YA series, Maximum Ride, has a new installment with Fang. iTunes is offering the audio of Fang: Book One as a free preview. Narrated by Jill Apple, the preview is a one hour and five minutes long! That’s huge as far as freebies go!
Overdrive:
OverDrive has released its list of the most downloaded eBooks and audiobooks from libraries for February. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, narrated by Paul Michael, tops the audiobook fiction list and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, narrated by the author is the top audio non-fiction title. In the juvenile category, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, read by Jesse Bernstein tops the fiction list and Night by Elie Wiesel and read by George Guidall is the top nonfiction juvenile audio book download.
eBook Costs:
The NY Times ran an article this weekend about the actual cost of producing an eBook as opposed to a print edition. As publishers are pushing to raise the costs of eBooks beyond the $9.99 standard that Kindle has set, this is interesting information. These figures are generalized, based on the answers from several publishing houses.
Amazon Kindle
An average hardcover that might retail for $26 will cost a bookseller around $13. Out of the gross revenue, $3.25 goes to printing, storing and shipping. 80 cents is attributed to cover design, copy editing and typesetting. Somewhere around $1 goes to marketing.
The author, of course, will get a 15% royalty which is $3.90 for a $26 book. That may be higher for bestselling authors. That leaves the publisher with somewhere in the neighborhood of $4.05. Of course, their expenses must also come out of that for running their office.
An eBook that costs $12.99 will yield $9.09 for the publisher in the new agreement with Apple for the iPad books. Out of that, 50 cents goes to converting the text to a digital file format and edit it and 78 cents goes towards marketing. The author’s royalty may be between $2.27-3.25. That leaves $4.56-5.54 for the publisher who then has those same day-to-day expenses.
It looks as though eBooks would be more profitable for the publishers, but they say this is not true. If eBooks begin to overtake hardcover sales, the fixed costs associated with hardcover books production will still be there but will be shared by fewer books sold.
The bottom line is that nobody really knows what the publishers’ actual profit margin is. I just hope that issues are resolved in a way that consumers have affordable digital downloads without delayed release dates. Discuss this article in our Audiobook Forum.
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