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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstraction" data-source="post: 2345234" data-attributes="member: 25995">I have worked in the print industry twenty years, though not hardcover. I hear a lot of people complaining about price on these new books. They have to understand two things. One, WotC hardcovers are the match of any textbook, both in printing and research. Full color throughout, high quality art, consistent easy-to-use design and sturdily made. Priced any textbooks lately?Second, most people don't seem to understand the costs involved in printing. Paper and ink are cheap. Very, very cheap even if the prices have gone up. What is expensive is hours. The number of hours to get a book ready to print, from design to plates to makeready on the press, is the same no matter how many you produce. The difference between X number of books and 2X number of books is just some more hours on press, the cheap paper and ink, and some more hours in bindery. In other words, with lower print runs (which I have to assume with anything outside the 3 core), you have a higher unit cost per each. Wizards doesn't have to do anything in particular in printing to get the cost down. They have to sell more of each book in order to do so.Let me also just briefly address the type size/leading issue. In printing, we have things called signatures. If you took a press-size sheet of paper and folded it down to book size, you would probably have 16 pages for the type of printing that WotC does (it could be 8, but I think a book printer would use a 40" press). So the book HAS to have pages in multiples of 16. The number of pages are probably decided first, before any content is produced. Then each section is alloted its pages and a rough word count. The writers produce the word count and it is manipulated to fit the alloted space using art and adjusting point size and leading.Could they produce the book in 16 less pages with less art, 10 point type on 12 point leading? Yes, probably. They could even pass those savings on to you. Do you want a thinner book if you save 50¢? A dollar? We're talking really minimal cost per unit.I agree that it would be nice if they filled the book with more stuff, but then we have to talk about the deadline monster, not to mention handling the reflow. Probably not worth it to have the books be a week late, even if they do increase the crunch by, say, 15%.</blockquote>

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