Price of audiobooks

[Harley Sachs]

We have produced audio versions of a number of my books (see catalog linked to my web site). TRoday cassette audiobooks are disappearing, being replaced by audiobook on CD. We bought an expensive and delicate high speed cassette duplicator, bought label stock whoesale in Brooklyn, and binders in Washington state. Now, of course, it is cheaper to burn CDs or even DVDs of audiobook,s making the manufacturing cost very minimall. Generally the retail price of an audiobook is $5 per cassette, that is, a six casette audiobook sells for about $30, which is steep. But now MP3 formats make audibooks even more compact and a dozen of my audiobooks on mp3 format can fit on a single CD. People are listening to them on ipods and tiny mp3 players, etc. Downloads then become pretty cheap. A problem is that people who download a copyrighted audio feel free to share it with others. WHen you lend a paper copy of a book to a friend that is legal. Making copies of an audio and distributing it to others is not lega. The bottom line is: are you depriving the author of her llivelihood? It takes a year to write a book, so what do you expect to earn for a year's work?
See my list at www.hu.mtu.edu/~hlsachs.