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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9648905" data-attributes="member: 907">From a customer perspective, it's not just the physical production that makes it feel like PDFs should be significantly cheaper than hardcopy. It's also cutting out at least one middle-man. Traditionally, physical RPG books come from a publisher, go to a distributor, and then to a retailer before the end customer buys it. With a PDF, the chain is instead publisher to e-store (e.g. DTRPG) to end customer, and sometimes not even that (though in that case the publisher takes on the expense of running the store themselves, so it's sort of a wash).I saw somewhere (might have been in one of these threads) that typically, MSRP is set at 6x physical production costs. I understand that it's usually more complex than that, but it will serve as an example. Further, the publisher usually sells to a distributor at a 60% discount on MSRP, who then sells on to the retailer at 50% discount (again, simplified). So, let's say you have a book with an MSRP of $60. The cut is then something like this:$30 to retailer.$6 to distributor.$10 to production.Leaving $14 net to the publisher, which is then used to pay creators and ideally make some actual profit as well.If you sell via DTRPG, it is my understanding that their cut is 30% of the sales price if you sell exclusively via them, or 35% if you can sell it in other places as well. We can round this off to saying they take 1/3 of the sales price, which means that you can get a sales price by taking what money you as a publisher wants and adding 50%. So from that perspective, $21 would be a "fair" price for the book in question. Adding in some additional cost for convenience (you don't need to do bookmarks and internal hyperlinks and possibly layers in a physical book, but they're pretty neat to have in a PDF), a discount on the PDF of 30-50% compared to the physical book doesn't seem unrealistic.</blockquote>

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