[ubuntu-uk] Book costs (was Re: e-books without Adobe Digital Editions)

[Will Bickerstaff]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Glen Mehn <glen.mehn at oba.co.uk> wrote:

> <snip>
> The bank analogy doesn't exactly make sense as banks are replacing
> something expensive for them (employees, time, and physical space) with
> something very scalable and well-understood (web apps). Books switching
> to ebook is replacing something well-understood and dirt cheap
> (printing/distribution) with something not so well understood (three
> major competing formats, a dizzying array of DRM options or not,
> personal fears in a declining industry, no standard)
>

So a second hand 10 year old half decent machine is going to set us back
circa £250,000 (Not cheap). Believe it or not, the equipment is actually
going to need to occupy some physical space. Likewise our finished products
are also going to need to occupy physical space until they are distributed.
Space is space, whether you a bank or a printer, in fact as a printer your
probably going to need more than a bank. Then we have energy use, some 33kW,
Maintenance Work and operators, so there's your employees and time which I
don't think materially differ too much from banks either. There's also a ton
of other work that you'd need to account for whether it be another energy
consumer or direct labour, think loading/unloading materials packaging for
despatch, order taking and processing staff facilities etc. So actually, I
think the bank analogy works very well. In my opinion, there are probably
bigger savings for printers than banks.
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