Comment by lgiordano_notte
1 day ago
font licensing feels like it never caught up with how software actually gets made now. charging more for app use than for mass print always seemed backwards, especially when indie devs are scraping by and a font costs more than your backend. no wonder people end up using “free alternatives” without looking too hard at where they came from.
I am of the opinion that the licenses for fonts in software are too expensive, but why is the pricing ‘backwards’? Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
> Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
Do you have a citation for that?
Printing a book costs just about nothing, it’s astonishingly cheap to print a quality book in volume. Author royalties are not that high (I suppose famous authors whose name alone sell books is another story), then you have retail margins and overhead.
The top three book publishers’ have sales in the low billions with operating margins in the 10 - 20% range.
It is a healthy industry even if it is smaller than it used to be.
The one problem with books is that shipping an individual book to a single consumer costs a far more than printing the book, but there is zero shipping and zero printing costs for ebooks, just the retailer margin.
Short answer: Nobody fucking knows because the accounting is more non-GAAP than your typical investment fraud house.
A few spots for folks interested in some amount of numbers:
https://slate.com/culture/2024/04/book-sales-publishing-indu...
https://archive.is/nGY6D
https://janefriedman.com/book-pl/
Book publishing is at least as bad as VC work. You publish a lot of books to have a catalog, and a few books make inordinately more money than the rest which keeps the lights on. New printings sound cheap enough, but a lot of books don’t get many of those. The long tail is very flat.
And as for the authors, most would make a lot more money tutoring for the same number of hours of effort they put into the book. Those appearance fees might make it better, but how many people get those?
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> while software developers do.
Ouch!
What is wrong with me then?