The first link is (a) talking about John Grisham, not technical books or even most fiction ("$2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists"), and (b) double counting the wholesaler/distributor ("$2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distrobution for publishers" as well as "Most books are sold to retailers at X% discount of the cover price by the wholesalers. ... [S]o we can assume a midlist novel might be 20-30%").
The five thoughts at the end of the second are...interesting:
"There are a lot more stages and costs than anyone would imagine.
"This convoluted process can be optimized in innumerable ways – Mr. Bezos would be hard pressed to find a more ‘improvable/kaizenable’ business model.
"Everyone who works for publishing companies claims that there is little money to be made and everyone does it for the love of it. Not sure if this is a function of profits not being shared with employees or there simply are no profits.
"There is huge consolidation of power...
"The number of people employed is staggering. A bail-out for Publishing doesn’t seem as crazy an idea.
"[There are immediately obvious optimization opportunities.]"
The first link is (a) talking about John Grisham, not technical books or even most fiction ("$2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists"), and (b) double counting the wholesaler/distributor ("$2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distrobution for publishers" as well as "Most books are sold to retailers at X% discount of the cover price by the wholesalers. ... [S]o we can assume a midlist novel might be 20-30%").
The five thoughts at the end of the second are...interesting:
"There are a lot more stages and costs than anyone would imagine.
"This convoluted process can be optimized in innumerable ways – Mr. Bezos would be hard pressed to find a more ‘improvable/kaizenable’ business model.
"Everyone who works for publishing companies claims that there is little money to be made and everyone does it for the love of it. Not sure if this is a function of profits not being shared with employees or there simply are no profits.
"There is huge consolidation of power...
"The number of people employed is staggering. A bail-out for Publishing doesn’t seem as crazy an idea.
"[There are immediately obvious optimization opportunities.]"