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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cthulhu's Librarian" data-source="post: 1390001" data-attributes="member: 11064">Overstock sells for cheap because they buy bulk overstocks from the publishers and the distributors. Thats why their prices are so low. Local stores could never buy in bulk like they do, so it's rediculous to think that they could ever approach the same prices. Amazon sells in such large quantities that they can mark books down to only a few % over their cost, and still make money. Plus, most people don't buy just one book at Amazon, they buy several books at a time. So even though the profit per book is small, on large orders Amazon makes a good amount of money. Books come with a preset price, usually printed on the book. That price is set by the manufacturer, and the discount the store gets when buying the book is usually around 45% of that cost (so they buy the book at 55% of retail). This is less of a price discount than almost any other retail product. The more books you buy (large quantities of books, not 10 or 20 copies), the better the discount. Obviously, a small store isn't going to be able to by anywhere near the quantities that Amazon buys in, so they get a smaller discount than Amazon. Having worked for a major publisher several years ago, I got to see first hand how much $ was made on books by the publishers. A profit of $1 per book sold  was a very good profit (I'm talking about your typical $25 hardcover novel). This is after all costs are figured in-paying the author, designer, copyediting, editing, artist, printing, etc. That's not a big profit. On RPG books, the profit is most likely even less.There are RPG companies that are publishing one book just to pay off the production costs of their previous book, never mind make a profit.  Thats not a good business plan, but they do it. Keep that in mind when talking about the cost of RPGs books being too high. If they were lower, they probably wouldn't exist at all.</blockquote>

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