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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jim Butler" data-source="post: 1051538" data-attributes="member: 1461">I really think seeing how many pages a particular product has and then trying to compare prices based solely on that is misleading. Some products have very wide margins with large type; others have normal margins with small type. Some are full-color; most are black & white. Some are based on licenses (which cost more money for the publisher); others are not.The retail prices for books are based on lots of things: cost of designers, editors, and illustrators; printing costs; marketing expenses. For all d20 companies, their costs for printing a book are higher than that of WotC. WotC prints 50,000+ copies of a single book, and they get huge cost breaks from the printer for doing so. Small d20 publishers print a few thousand of a particular book, and thus they end up paying significantly more than WotC. Printing is the single largest expense that a publisher has. Until we can start selling as many as WotC (which I don't see happening), I doubt you're going to see pricing levels fall significantly below that of WotC. Wizards was charging $19.95 for their 96-page books. At that price, they could make money and continue to invest in new R&D. Small publishers need money to invest in new products just as badly as WotC does.</blockquote>