If you go into a Chapters, you may be astonished by the prices on books. And, particularly if you are listening to someone from the corporate management side of a publisher, you may hear that it is not profitable to publish books.
Thirty years ago the two biggest costs of publishing were paper and film. The film was used to make printing plates, also a large expense, from production artwork. A decade earlier that production artwork was also expensive as it had to be done on boards with wax to stick stuff down and knives to cut out type that was typeset separately in galleys.
By the time I entered the industry the manual page assembly cost had all but gone. I saw two people doing that work, briefly in two different studios. But my arrival meant that all the cost of typesetting and manual page assembly had disappeared, to be replaced with Quark XPress. By the time I was working in the 1990s, the cost of producing a book had already dropped quite a bit over the previous decade.
Another big cost of printing complicated books was proofing. But around the turn of the century, PDF proofing eliminated that cost. Then printable paper plates replaced costly metal plates, and therefore film. The cost of producing books had at that point decreased dramatically.
When I was still doing book composition work, I was being payed between $7 and $24 per page depending on the complexity. That work dried up when publishers started to offshore their production to India at $2 per page. Book publishing got cheaper again.
I was at a writer’s seminar, years ago now, where I learned that publishers typically no longer pay for any editing, and if an author wants that, they have to pay for it themselves. So the cost of producing a book is less, again. By the way, everyone needs an editor.
And we come to e-books and audio books. Since paper was typically the biggest cost of producing a book, here is an enormous savings. The publisher can stop at the stage where a South-Asian sweatshop produces an electronic document, or the author themselves often, records the audiobook. And again, the COST of producing a book is significantly decreased.
But here we are. A suit from a publisher can say in an interview or and article that book publishing is too expensive and they cannot make a profit on it. And people will uncritically accept that lie and justification for high prices because they are unaware of what that price increase really is.
And what it is is profiteering. Since 1990, the very successful publishers I took my school portfolio to show, have become publicly traded and amalgamated and they have been turned from makers of books into makers of dividends for rich people. They are an extractive mechanism for making the rich richer. And the high cost of books, like the high cost of almost everything else, is their exploitative profiteering.
