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I mean, if GW allows them to show it page by page, crearly legible, I don't think that counts as piracy.

yukishiro1 wrote:
The fact that they keep sending books to people who post them in their entirety on youtube reviews suggests that they don't really care if you, well, read what's shown to you.

Yea, people still buy books. Screenshots are pretty inconvenient, really and not easy to casually peruse like with a book.

The profit margin on books is tiny compared to plastic, the books are really just an advertisement for the plastic, so if posting the book on youtube gets a bunch of people to buy plastic who wouldn't otherwise...that's a win for GW. They'll never come out and tell people they don't care whether they buy the books or not, but the fact is that if someone buys the plastic and never spends a penny on a book...that suits GW just fine.

yukishiro1 wrote:
The profit margin on books is tiny compared to plastic, the books are really just an advertisement for the plastic, so if posting the book on youtube gets a bunch of people to buy plastic who wouldn't otherwise...that's a win for GW. They'll never come out and tell people they don't care whether they buy the books or not, but the fact is that if someone buys the plastic and never spends a penny on a book...that suits GW just fine.

The margin can't be that bad, can it? It certainly isn't as good as the margin on plastic, but still... Books certainly do drive interest though.

Printing and shipping heavy, glossy, full-color books is super expensive. Even when you do it in China.

The printing costs for a $50 GW plastic kit is a small fraction of the printing costs for a $50 GW book. It's not even close.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2020-hot-sales-cheap-high-quality_1600063109367.html?spm=a2700.7735675.normal_offer.d_image.19d6f362fo1JJF&s=p

It doesn't seem to be as cheap as making models, but even if the cost of books jumps 10 times because of transport, they should still be making profit on those books.

I think we can conclusively state that if GW wasn't making an acceptable profit on their books, they wouldn't publish as many of them as they do. After all, why spend good money to lose money on all those Codexes when they could publish few multi-army Indexes, even with more detailed rules, that would sell more units each?

yukishiro1 wrote:
Printing and shipping heavy, glossy, full-color books is super expensive. Even when you do it in China.

The printing costs for a $50 GW plastic kit is a small fraction of the printing costs for a $50 GW book. It's not even close.

Are we talking the unit cost or the cost of getting moulds set up here?

Karol wrote:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2020-hot-sales-cheap-high-quality_1600063109367.html?spm=a2700.7735675.normal_offer.d_image.19d6f362fo1JJF&s=p

It doesn't seem to be as cheap as making models, but even if the cost of books jumps 10 times because of transport, they should still be making profit on those books.

Lol, you can't print a 100 page full color hardback book for $1, no matter how many pieces you order. If you actually followed up with those people you'd find out that's probably just the base cost, before adding on for materials, pages, color, etc.

GW isn't losing money on those books, don't get me wrong, but they aren't making much either - certainly not compared to what they make off plastic. Printing plastic is nearly free, the costs are essentially all in the setup; once you recoup your setup costs, the profit margin is obscene. Books are different - the cost of printing is much more significant per unit.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 alextroy wrote:
I think we can conclusively state that if GW wasn't making an acceptable profit on their books, they wouldn't publish as many of them as they do. After all, why spend good money to lose money on all those Codexes when they could publish few multi-army Indexes, even with more detailed rules, that would sell more units each?

They aren't losing money (except on the big flops like that terrain book that literally nobody bought), but to put that aside, even if they were, it wouldn't make sense to consolidate into a few multi-army releases, because the whole point is to inspire people to buy plastic. If you release your stuff all at once, you don't do that. The constant stream of books is to keep people hyped and engaged and buying new plastic.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
Printing and shipping heavy, glossy, full-color books is super expensive. Even when you do it in China.

The printing costs for a $50 GW plastic kit is a small fraction of the printing costs for a $50 GW book. It's not even close.

Are we talking the unit cost or the cost of getting moulds set up here?

The plastic itself costs practically nothing, all the cost of a sprue is in the mould and machine.

Yep. Books are cheap to write and extremely expensive to print. Plastic is comparatively expensive to design, but essentially free once you have things set up.

The plastic may be cheap, but those molds don’t sit around spontaneously spitting out sprues. It takes labor, machinery, and electricity to produce those models in addition to the plastic.

 alextroy wrote:
The plastic may be cheap, but those molds don’t sit around spontaneously spitting out sprues. It takes labor, machinery, and electricity to produce those models in addition to the plastic.

Printing presses also take labor, machinery and electricity.
Whats your point?

I doubt GW are spending more than $3-4 a book. This is almost certainly considerably more than any halfway popular plastic kit (which will eventually be depreciated down to just a few cents) - but at the same time, if you ultimately sell both for $40-50, the people along the chain should be making plenty of money.

 Ordana wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
The plastic may be cheap, but those molds don’t sit around spontaneously spitting out sprues. It takes labor, machinery, and electricity to produce those models in addition to the plastic.

Printing presses also take labor, machinery and electricity.
Whats your point?

The point is you can't just say "plastic cheap" so models are more profitable. Paper is cheap also. Determining which is cheaper to produce is a matter of much more than the input material.

Of course it is. Where did anyone say otherwise?

The profit margin on plastic kit is far, far higher than on hardback glossy color books. It isn't even close. GW has a 31% profit margin (25% before IP licensing); that's obscene and dwarfs the profits of anyone in publishing by miles, even with publishers doing better recently than they have in a very long time. And I guarantee you the big publishers get better deals on printing than GW does.

Big publishers don't charge $50 for a Codex-sized book

Tyel wrote:
I doubt GW are spending more than $3-4 a book. This is almost certainly considerably more than any halfway popular plastic kit (which will eventually be depreciated down to just a few cents) - but at the same time, if you ultimately sell both for $40-50, the people along the chain should be making plenty of money.

It's likely a bit more than that. 100+ page 9x12 glossy full color hardbacks are very expensive to produce. Obviously I don't have their contracts available to know for sure, but that would be a very competitive printing contract. I would be surprised if their profit margin on books is even 1/3 what it is on plastic.

 alextroy wrote:
Big publishers don't charge $50 for a Codex-sized book

It depends largely on expected sales volume. There are two reasons why your university books cost so much: They are in a niche subject, and you HAVE to buy them for your class.

 Charistoph wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
Big publishers don't charge $50 for a Codex-sized book

It depends largely on expected sales volume. There are two reasons why your university books cost so much: They are in a niche subject, and you HAVE to buy them for your class.

Speaking of edition churn...

 Charistoph wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
Big publishers don't charge $50 for a Codex-sized book

It depends largely on expected sales volume. There are two reasons why your university books cost so much: They are in a niche subject, and you HAVE to buy them for your class.

All my college text books were way bigger than a $50 codex... and a whole lot more expensive! But that was a captive audience issue. The professors decided what books you purchases and they didn't need to care about the price. It's like buying food and drink at a sporting event. You have to buy from concessions, so the prices are crazy in any other context.

But that's an argument for healthy profit margins, not bad ones.

 alextroy wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
Big publishers don't charge $50 for a Codex-sized book

It depends largely on expected sales volume. There are two reasons why your university books cost so much: They are in a niche subject, and you HAVE to buy them for your class.

All my college text books were way bigger than a $50 codex... and a whole lot more expensive! But that was a captive audience issue. The professors decided what books you purchases and they didn't need to care about the price. It's like buying food and drink at a sporting event. You have to buy from concessions, so the prices are crazy in any other context.

But that's an argument for healthy profit margins, not bad ones.

And can you buy another's books to play 40K other than GW's if you don't want to spend hours developing acceptance with your lcoal group? We're dealing with a similar captive audience issue, and, I might add, also consider the fact that if the professor has a book on the subject matter in question, you're using his book for the class.

Still, it's not like those books are regular sellers at your local B.Dalton or on Amazon's all-category best seller lists any more than a Warhammer book is.

They must be making a good deal still on their books. Unless people don't remember they were selling the books digital as well for a time which had to be the most cost effective right ? Well I guess not as they stopped to then fall back on paper books. They put out tons of them though, as physical copies, they wouldn't do that all the time if it wasn't a good deal for them as more than just a way to move models. The fact it moves models with rules is a very good bonus.

 AngryAngel80 wrote:
They must be making a good deal still on their books. Unless people don't remember they were selling the books digital as well for a time which had to be the most cost effective right ? Well I guess not as they stopped to then fall back on paper books. They put out tons of them though, as physical copies, they wouldn't do that all the time if it wasn't a good deal for them as more than just a way to move models. The fact it moves models with rules is a very good bonus.

I would guess that the move away from digital books is more a result of trying to fight piracy, useless tho it may be, then because paper books are so amazing.

 Charistoph wrote:

 alextroy wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
Big publishers don't charge $50 for a Codex-sized book

It depends largely on expected sales volume. There are two reasons why your university books cost so much: They are in a niche subject, and you HAVE to buy them for your class.

All my college text books were way bigger than a $50 codex... and a whole lot more expensive! But that was a captive audience issue. The professors decided what books you purchases and they didn't need to care about the price. It's like buying food and drink at a sporting event. You have to buy from concessions, so the prices are crazy in any other context.

But that's an argument for healthy profit margins, not bad ones.

And can you buy another's books to play 40K other than GW's if you don't want to spend hours developing acceptance with your lcoal group? We're dealing with a similar captive audience issue, and, I might add, also consider the fact that if the professor has a book on the subject matter in question, you're using his book for the class.

Still, it's not like those books are regular sellers at your local B.Dalton or on Amazon's all-category best seller lists any more than a Warhammer book is.

So I think we agree that GW probably makes better margin on their rulebooks than the average bookseller?

 Ordana wrote:

 AngryAngel80 wrote:
They must be making a good deal still on their books. Unless people don't remember they were selling the books digital as well for a time which had to be the most cost effective right ? Well I guess not as they stopped to then fall back on paper books. They put out tons of them though, as physical copies, they wouldn't do that all the time if it wasn't a good deal for them as more than just a way to move models. The fact it moves models with rules is a very good bonus.

I would guess that the move away from digital books is more a result of trying to fight piracy, useless tho it may be, then because paper books are so amazing.

More likely that they want to push more people towards using the app - thus ensuring that they get mucho grande cashola.


(If they are trying to fight piracy, they're failing miserably - it's not like it's greatly more difficult to find a scan of any particular hard copy book now that it ever was to find a PDF which fell off the back of a truck)

OUR COMBAT PATROL BOX IS AWESOME!

Did not expect that- a Raider, a Ravager and Incubi? Fabulous!

Well, that's that. We knew, but now its official and everything:
Dark Eldar are getting jack and squat, and jack went home.

Have some dice. [Actually the dice are pretty nice. I'm sniggering a bit at the idea that turquoise is 'dark,' however. DE apparently have surprisingly pretty souls.]

The dice are a deep turquoise – as dark as a Drukhari’s soul – with off-white pips and the sigil of the Kabal of the Black Heart in place of the 6

Really, really good box, I agree. Let's see if the previews tomorrow are as good as this announcement.

Voss wrote:
Well, that's that. We knew, but now its official and everything:
Dark Eldar are getting jack and squat, and jack went home.

Have some dice. [Actually the dice are pretty nice. I'm sniggering a bit at the idea that turquoise is 'dark,' however. DE apparently have surprisingly pretty souls.]

The dice are a deep turquoise – as dark as a Drukhari’s soul – with off-white pips and the sigil of the Kabal of the Black Heart in place of the 6

I'm gonna be a bit nitpicky, but it's annoying that GW have switched the DE faction symbol to that of The Kabal of the Black Heart.