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Annoyance With High Cost of Materials | ||
Tags: Low budget | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 17 of 33 17 October 2014 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I used to be a much bigger fan of Amazon, but nowdays I think they are only a little bit far from the devil. By essentially not paying taxes in the countries they sell in in Europe, they can charge something like 10% less than bricks-and-mortar businesses in the same countries and so run other businesses into the ground. The best thing going for publishing in Germany is the law not allowing new books to be discounted, which stops Amazon from undercutting other businesses. For instance, Amazon's new fix priced cost for downloading as many books as you want per month - a sort of Spotify for books - sounds great in theory, but the equivalent in music has proved disastrous for musician revenues. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4710 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 18 of 33 17 October 2014 at 11:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I should caveat that I referenced the Madrigal courses just as an example of insanely
expensive books. Their Spanish one is still in print and costs around $12 new I think. The pronunciation course was the insanely expensive course in this instance. Anyway... Iguanomon, you always have great ideas. I found the original pronunciation course through interlibrary loan and it is said to have the CDs too. I plan to use the library overhead scanner to scan the whole book to my own thumb drive and then rip the audio. Hooray. I do appreciate all the other suggestions for resources! Sometimes my acquisition of sources is more about the hunt than anything ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Leurre Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5424 days ago 219 posts - 372 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Korean, Haitian Creole, SpanishC2 Studies: Japanese | Message 19 of 33 17 October 2014 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well mateys, there be some ways in which to circumvent the problems of costs.
... buy used 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4748 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 20 of 33 18 October 2014 at 4:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's puzzling why the cost of digital material (books in pdf, epub, mobi etc formats) is the same as the cost of print editions... They have propagated digitization of material, yet they keep the prices at the same level.
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| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 21 of 33 18 October 2014 at 12:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Camundoguinho, It's because they are either stupid or they just want to demotivate people from buying ebooks so that they can say "readers obviously want the old ways of books distribution and pricing". It is evident in the Czech Republic. A book that costs 300 crowns in paper (that's like 12 euros), costs 250 or more as an ebook. Result? People do not buy legal ebooks much, therefore they aren't used to it and don't create the market publishers would need to fill in order to survive. And as many Czech readers are too stupid to undertand learning another language would broaden and cheapen their options, the publishers can still sell their overpriced, heavy, not practical hardcovers as the main form in which books are available.
patrickwilken, I think the trouble with Spotify and most such services is the total dependence on the service as you don't have a copy of the song in your computer. Having a huge list of songs you can listen to only on streaming (goodbye listening in your summer home in the mountains or on the go) and dependent on a service that may or may not be available a few month from now, that isn't something the majority of the market should follow and it is not omething that awesome for the bands too. I think the best ways for music are: 1:Youtube like services that pay per view from the ads or better, you can pay per view/listen without ads. And the musicians get paid for the real number of customers- 2:itunes like services but for reasonable prices (the thing is most musicians have totally wrong ideas about their worth. a normal mediocre artist just can't be sold for the same price as a legend) 3:download for free bringing lots of people to concerts, buying cds and other merchandise etc, which is the real money source for the musicians. Some artists have already understood the copy of a song is basically a very efficient advertisement, not the main and only product. And it could be the same for ebooks. You know, for example Neil Gaiman once wrote an awesome article how giving away one of his books as a free ebook skyrocketed the sales of not only his other books but as well the one given away. People tried the author for free and wanted to pay. It was that easy. And there are more authors like that, such as Paulo Coelho. I think giving away ebooks really cheaply (which means with an appropriate price for the real work the author and publisher have invested) or for free, that would in the end earn them much more money than overpricing everything. Patrick, I think the main trouble of the system is not how much does each part of the chain pay in taxes or that one overpriced seller makes another overpriced seller go bankrupt. It is how little they pay to the authors. When I buy a legal ebook anywhere, only a few % go to the author (and I'd love them to have most of the money as they are awesome and irreplaceable for the book creation!), very small % covers the real costs of publishing an ebook (as lots of work related to putting in on paper is not needed anymore), some % are taxes and vast majority is a profit of someone with underdevelopped sense for fair prices and shame. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4081 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 22 of 33 19 October 2014 at 5:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Huh? I have always had to pay taxes to amazon.co.uk/.de when they ship to an EU country based on the tax rate of the country being shipped to. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5235 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 23 of 33 19 October 2014 at 12:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Actually it is because the cost of media material is the least significant amount of investment. Most of the money a book publisher spends is on employee costs not printing. The cost of authors, editors, line editors, fact checkers, lawyers, accountants, cover designers, graphic artists, researchers, etc make up over 95% of the production cost of a book and the actual material is less that 1%. So if you want a cost reduction you'd have to have a quality reduction as well. BTW the cost of distribution which is 60% of the cover price of a book goes to the distributor, e.g. Amazon regardless of if the book is print or digital. And they will not reduce their costs because they still have to pay for all those servers which need programmers, system administrators, database administrators, support staff, warehouse staff, logistics drivers, trucks, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 24 of 33 19 October 2014 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is probably getting way of the topic for HTLAL, but if you Google "Amazon tax EU" you'll get lots of links, for instance (since you mention the UK): http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/may/09/margaret-hod ge-urges-boycott-amazon-uk-tax-starbucks
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