This book is free, but that doesn't mean it's cheap. While I offer you a complete free ebook with the only restriction that you can't print it at full quality (because if you're going to print it, that's going to cost you quite a bit of money, so why not buy a proper copy instead for, basically, LESS MONEY, and enjoy the text in decent quality instead of scaled down bitmapped fonts), it still costs me an actually fairly hefty amount to offer you this book legally.
In order to be on the legal side of town, the fonts used in the book need proper licenses, and in order to get you printed paper copies, I need to be registered as a business, just so the book can be be turned into a purchasable product.
So, “what does it cost to make a book?” Well, here's the rundown:
First off, yes, fonts are ridiculously expensive if you buy them on a “per font” basis. Find out which products come with the fonts you want to use and then buy those, instead.
Adding everything up we come at just under €1150 for required technologies and publication setup (which excludes the cost of the printers), which is just shy of $1550 (US).
That's a lot of money for a free book!
Of course, this also doesn't include the rather ridiculous concept of “virtual cost” expressed in hours I worked on this book, rather than my normal job (I work 80% so that I have three days to work on my own projects per week). This is a pointless number, and I won't bore you with it, but of course it does factor in to the final “was it worth it?” question. I consider the fact that there is a free book for you to use an affirmative answer to that question, but it would be foolish to ignore the finances.
In order for the book to be affordable by everyone, I will be pricing it around €20, which is roughly US$30/CD$32 at the moment, which I think we can all agree is a rather fair price for a textbook. My aim here is not to become a millionaire (are there even any millionaire textbook authors?), and if I make it $50 or more then I might be in the same range as normal textbooks, but why would you bother buying it at that price?
I know I personally hate paying anything over $50 for a textbook, so my price point is basically under what you'd pay to have it printed yourself, making it actually cheaper for you to buy a copy than it would be to walk over to your local Kinko (okay, FedEX) and have them print you a copy with a cheap metal ring binding and some plastic covers. Not to mention if you do that, it'll look worse, because the ebook can only be printed at reduced resolution.
The bottom line: pay less, get more.
I don't think I can get more fair than that really. So back to pricing, what does this mean in terms of required sales?
For every book printed, about $10 per book goes to the printer (print-on-demand short runs are more expensive than offset printing, but they do let people order batches of 100, 10 or even 1, rather than offset printing's 5000 or 10000). Retail gets a 25% to 33% wholesale discount, so depending on how many books they order, that leaves me with 7 to 5 euro “profit” per book. Then taxes takes away about 35% of that, and I'm left with about 5 to 3 euro income per book. That's not a lot, especially when you take into account that I need to recover the initial 1150ish euro investment.
So, in order to cover the cost of even offering the world the free book, I need to actually sell 200 copies of the not-free book.
In order to actually make a profit, things get a more interesting, because I have a student loan that needs paying off. As such, while anything over the initial 200 books might be considered profit, I don't see any of that money unless sales exceed 300 euro per month, which is what I'll be paying per month for the next fifteen years to clear my student loan. I'll let you do the math, but it comes out to “a lot of money”.
This means that after those 200 copies, ideally I'd sell over 60 copies a month to cover my student loan payments. I have no idea how many copies will actually sell. I've seen some figures by other niche-market publishers and between 100 and 200 books a month seems a decent guess, but ultimately just that; a guess. I hope this book sells well =)
And yes, I know I ask you to donate a little if you like the book, but I don't expect any income from donations. I've had the option to donate to NR for years, and the reality is that I can count the number of donations I get per year on two hands. It's not a form of income in any way, it just covers the server costs, basically.
Don't get me wrong, I am eternally grateful for every donation I receive, because I know how much brain justification goes into the decision to send someone your money as a token of appreciation, rather than as a payment for something. Which is why not a lot of people do it.
Anyway: you don't generate income by hoping, you need to have something to offer in return, and for that, there will now be this book. Sold at a bookstore near you!
- Mike “Pomax” Kamermans