<Snip> I am glad there is an attempt to start selling diagrams digitally, but it only stands to prove why piracy exists. Five dollars for a single very simple penguin? Eight dollars for a single butterfly? Are you out of your mind? So when you publish your book of thirty models all being worth that you will charge us $150??? I would maybe try to pay that for a Lang book of his finest thirty models. You are out of touch and greedy.
<Snip> -James Giba The cost per digital diagramfrom OUSA vs a Dover (or other company) Book is a bit different. It is understandable if you take the stance that you're selling to a much smaller audience (5-10 thousand at maximum maybe) and you're not dealing with a big publishing company (tens to hundreds of thousands probably, depending on the book). I warn you my math might be off and I'm not a economics person, but here we go. Assume one were to be paid per hour at minimum wage (lets say $7.50, but would probably be more costly than minimum wage) while diagramming. If it takes 5 hours to create the diagram (I'd say it takes longer than that on most models above 50 steps), the original diagram would be $37.50 to break even, but lets say you want to aim for twice that for profit. OUSA gives the artist a rather large cut at 58-70% of the list price (we'll go with 58% here), so lets say you're aiming to make $129 to get about $75, or essentially your $37.50 profit total. If you sell the diagram at $1, you'll have to sell around 129 copies of the diagram to make that $37.50 profit. I'm sure most people would ideally want more than that for profit though. If you took a bug by Robert Lang, etc. and plugged it in at just $14 per hour and say it took 15 hours to diagram (again, probably more than that on both accounts), at the 58% rate and same profit goal and sold it at $5, you'd have to sell around 132 copies. I'd say that would be fairly easy to achieve, but at $1 you'd have to sell 660+ copies, which might be tough to do for a particular model. So, overall its actually pretty cheap and there is a possibility of getting diagrams that most publishers wouldn't touch because of the limited market, even compared to convention books. Not to mention that OUSA gets a cut, which also goes back into our community vs a publisher getting it. Just adding in my insight on this :). -Joseph White
