bzs@encore.com (Barry Shein) (10/31/88)
From: ns@cat.cmu.edu (Nicholas Spies) >At $40/book that's $26,840.00 + $50.00 for the disc itself. Just the >author's royalties, figured at 15%, would make the disc cost $4,026 (after >all, why should the authors take a loss?). Therein lies the problem of very >dense media. Although your point is very good I think your figuring is high, authors don't get 15%, more like 1..3% depending on the track record of the author (first time authors often don't get any royalties, just a flat fee when the book is accepted.) Also, there will surely be a lot of titles on that disk for which no royalties are paid to authors (eg. classics.) I also think an average price of $40 can be safely dropped to $20, most of the volume in the publishing industry is in paperbacks anyhow and many classics are sold in paperback form for under $10. Remember that the overhead of the paper itself and printing/binding is eliminated so a lower estimate is justified. So I get: $20 x 671 x 0.02 = $268.40 as a lower bound, plus let's say $20 for the disk and copying ($50 is already a *list* price, profits should be calculated based on overheads) and we get under $300, fixed. So at $495 there's a decent profit in there for a fairly hefty collection ("SEND IN NOW...LESS THAN $1/book!") Beyond that observation I think it's safe to assume that the average household (or student for that matter) right now has far less than 600 titles on their shelves. So it wouldn't exactly compete with existing business but mostly create new business as these types of tidy collections become "must have" items for people, particularly with school-age children. (Note: I'm not specifically referring to NeXT here, just the general electronic publishing milieu.) -Barry Shein, ||Encore||