O'Reilly is having sale and discounts so often that I avoid buying books at the full price while waiting for a coupon. This often ends with me forgetting about the book and not buying it at all.
Because the margin is obviously higher on ebooks than print books. I imagine that more profit is made on an ebook sale at 50% off than a print book at full price.
As soon as you involve Amazon, that's surprisingly not true. Really.
O'Reilly makes more on e-book sales directly through their on-line store then they do on print. However, every e-book they sell via Amazon, their margins are very, very different. Here's a rough guide for a $40 book:
* O'Reilly E-Book Online Store: Approx 99% margin or $39.60
* O'Reilly Store selling print book (bulk print discount assumed): 95% margin or $38.00
* Amazon selling print book (bulk print discount assumed): Approx 90% margin or $36.00
* Amazon selling kindle e-book: 35% margin or $14.00 (minus the Amazon processing fee so it's actually worse)
Odds are the bulk of O'Reilly e-book sales are probably done on Amazon, where the margin is AWFUL. The constant huge sales by O'Reilly are a way to recoup the painful margins insisted upon by Amazon.
Yeah, Amazon makes boatloads off of kindle book sales.
But yes, the average print costs for a single-color book per unit are in the 2-4 dollar range (that is, manufacturing alone, no design, marketing, editing).
And how would it be possible for Amazon to "keep their lights on" selling physical books at 40% off list price, if they pay O'Reilly $36 for a $40 book? Amazon buys from O'Reilly and most other pubs at 60% off, non-returnable. So the math for the publishers' take from Amazon on physical books looks like this:
Thanks, that seems to be the only reasonable explanation.
Comparing the prices of a book on oreilly[1] and bookdepository.co.uk[2] seems to suggest a print book has about 50%(just a guess) margin while the ebooks sells for almost 100% margin once it is produced. So knocking the prices of ebook down to 50% to drive sales would make sense.
Thanks again,
[2]http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Programming-Collective-Intel... I assumed that these guys buy the book for 20 dollars and sell for 20 euros and make 25-30% profit. Great site btw with free worldwide shipping although delivery takes anywhere from 1 to 3 weeks.
