Sure, there are production costs, but ffs, even a film on DVD is less than that, and I’m sure production on a film is much higher than on an audio book. Not to mention the book itself will generate it’s own revenue, so it’s not as if this is the only way people can get the story.
That’s the library edition, Taomist. You can get it on CD for $54, or in mp3 format for $25. Even so, when it comes to audiobooks, the library isn’t just my friend, it’s my only friend.
The high cost for the library edition has been covered, but I did want to babble on a bit about the general high cost of an audiobook.
Kushiel’s Scion is 28.5 hours. 1710 minutes of audio. A music album is only going to have about 60 minutes of music on average. A band can knock out the recording for an album in a day or two if everything goes well; even if Simon Vance never made a mistake and talked non-stop, he couldn’t get it done in a day, and the poor bastard is just as susceptible to false starts, flubbed lines, and fatigue as any actor or band member is. There’s also just as much post-production as an album recording.
Not only do they need to pay the reader for his or her time and effort, there’s also the physical media (though it is admittedly a pretty small part of the cost these days). You can fit an album on a single CD, maybe two if it’s a huge project or has crappy multimedia bonus features. An unabridged audiobook takes up something like 8 to 15 CDs or cassette tapes, which makes it relatively expensive to print off a bunch of copies.
Then, on top of all the inherent costs, there’s the low demand to consider. Audiobooks are niche. Most people are at least passingly familiar with the concept, but they’re very far from mainstream. You can be reasonably sure you’ll sell at least a million copies of a DVD of a recent well-received film, and large expensive blockbusters are going to sell for way more. I must admit I don’t have any hard data to back it up, but I’m fairly sure audiobook sales number more in the tens of thousands.
Audible.com’s actually made some decent strides in lowering the cost of audiobooks. By taking them digital, they remove the need to print off physical media and also make audiobooks accessible to a larger audience, which helps defray the costs. I haven’t paid more than $15 for an audiobook in well over a year, and some of them are just as long as Kushiel’s Scion.
Allow me to clear up a few misconceptions in this thread.
The “Library Edition” of an audiobook is a special edition of the audiobook already in library packaging (a small binder as a opposed to a cardboard box). The titles also often come with a guarantee that the publisher will replace any disc from the set if it becomes damaged due to overuse.
It’s not a “rental edition” covering multiple readers and under the First Sale Doctrine, no such edition is required.
Please don’t think that! Libraries love donations of anything and everything. It helps us grow without spending a fortune. Copyright laws can’t stop that.
The actual production costs of an audiobook are miniscule compared to a music CD as the media cost of a CD is measured in pennies. And studio time/production costs for a single voice track is much smaller than is required for a band making music in a studio.
Finally, the price of audiobooks isn’t that much more than a regular book, with most retailing for $25-30 with the bigger books (like King’s Under the Dome) going for $50. Audiobooks are a huge cash cow for publishers as the book is already written and only requires a little studio time and media cost (again, at little expense) to create an audiobook.
Look at podcasting. That’s just a simple voice recording and everyone can do that with the microphone hooked up to their computer. Audiobook recording isn’t that much more advanced that it requires more than that. Timewise yes, but productionwide, a single vocal track is child’s play.
Sure, but they still need at least one tech for it, and I’m thinking primarily of paying for man-hours and studio space rental (assuming it’s actually done professionally and not just in someone’s closet).
I haven’t calculated the entire production cost, but I narrated and edited “Call of the Wild” for an audiobook company. I think the final recorded length was close to 6 hours. It took me nearly 3x that time to read the copy to myself…read it aloud and then listen to it again (in real time) to edit out the throat clearing, bad inhalations and other noises.
Recording the spoken word is harder than recording music…there’s not much there to hide behind.
Thanks for the interesting information; I had no idea! And it’s good to know I can still donate to the libraries; lord knows they’ve saved my arse many a time over the years.