Under a Gibbous Moon

I’m certain that by now we’ve all heard about the spat between Amazon and Macmillian Publishing over the pricing of eBooks. If not, Macmillian demanded the right to set the price on their eBooks to whatever they felt like and Amazon wanted them capped at $9.99. After an ugly back and forth, Macmillian won.

But this isn’t about that. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Macmillian trying to see what the market will bear with regards to newly published eBooks. What I find far more interesting is how eBooks will bring new life to a different market, low demand and out of print books.

Printing books is an expensive business. There’s the cost of paper and covers, ink and binding. After all that, they have to be shipped to the point of sale. All this means is that for anything to get published, a certain demand must be anticipated. This goes not only for new books but also for older ones. Today’s best seller is tomorrows bargain bin special.

Eventually, and this will vary from title to title, nearly all books will reach the threshold past which it is unprofitable to distribute them in print form. At that point the book falls out of print. It doesn’t mean that there is no longer a demand for this particular title but that merely that there is not enough of it to justify the expense of printing it. This cost is referred to as marginal cost. The beautiful thing about eBooks, though, is that the marginal cost of each eBook is essentially zero dollars.

This means that there is no reason to not have any title on the shelves, since it doesn’t cost money to keep them there. This opens up a whole new world of specialty books, one hit wonders, and former best sellers that would otherwise be difficult to find or would require a very expensive limited run from the publisher.

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