@Malintex_Terek:
Your personal experience isn't a great example,
You brought up the evil eye as a negative point in your experiance. I brought up that it hasn't been for me. Different experiance, its not a valid criticism.
Scanslations offer you the ability to choose who you read from. What you bring up are issues with the OP fan community
There are a bajillion OP groups, one doesn't have to stick to a particular group of the translation isn't of acceptable quality.
You implied that scanlations are inherantly better than official translation. The good ones are. Some aren't. And I pulled OP specific examples because… this is a OP board. Its the common ground.
This isn't strictly true. I'm still waiting for my $5 Diablo II you know.
Higher quantity sold means they CAN sell a lower price, it doesnt mean that they WILL. Supply and demand. Its why you can find a copy of Madden 03 for 1$ in a used bin at a game store, but Madden 09 is still 40$. Dragonball Budokai can be found for 5 bucks, but the most current DBZ game, Budokai Tenkaichi 3 still goes for 20-30. Yet Dragonball GT, a sega saturn low print run game that really wasnt that good and is on a dead system, goes for 150$. Supply and demand.
It's priced at $8 because the paper and ink quality is lower, the translations were obtained at flea market price, and the books are actually smaller. The amount of manhours that went into producing a Ranma volume far exceeds that of a SJ title. It's not because the tiles are more widely sold - or else, Ranma would be cheaper because it's sold a heck of a lot more books over the years than OP per volume.
The quality is a side effect of the price point, not the cause. Its because initial orders are higher, AND they're selling to a lower age demographic with presumably less money that they make the price point 8 bucks. The more copies of something you print at the outset, the cheaper it is per copy to make. (I know it doesn't make sense, but it is how it is.) For example.
Printing 1000 copies a book might cost 1,200 dollars, at 12 cents a copy. Printing 3000 copies of a book could cost 2,800 dollars, or roughly 8 cents a copy. Obviously, if you could print 1000 copies at that ammount, it would cost 800 bucks, which is a huge savings, but you cant. Because printers are wierd that way and the more you print the cheaper it gets per copy. (Be it for books or cds or whatever.)
But clearly, spending 2,800 dollars to get 3000 copies is NOT the same as spending 1200 dollars to get 1000 copies. Thats 1600 more dollars. Sure you get more copies, but you may not be able to sell those or have space to store them.
Initial print orders define print runs, because those are the copies you sell. If they KNOW they can sell 5000 copies of a SJ book on initial order, they can print that many and get a lower price. (And theres an entire ordering system in place through distributors liek Diamond and Barnes & Noble and whatnot.) So, given that SJ titles have a larger initial print run, AND they're being targeted at younger kids, they can get a lower price point to better appeal to that audience. ANd in a balance of supply and demand, get more orders and raise the print run even more.
Total sales of Ranma over two decades are completley insignifant. Sales of Ranma for whatever the CURRENT print run, ARE. I have no idea what the actual numbers are for Ranma sales, I am making these up for example sake.) Sure Ranma may have sold 40,000 copies over 20 years. But they didn't print 40,000 copies in 1988. They printed probably 1000. Those sold out, and they printed another 1000. ANd so an and so forth. Its a cash flow/warehouse space/supply and demand thing. If they had known in 1988 that they were eventually going to sell 40,000 copies, AND they had space to store it, AND the upfront capital, then they could have printed 40,000 at 10 cents a copy and made a huge profit in the long run. But they didn't, so they printed 1,000 copies at 3 dollars a copy Which in turn gave the book a higher price point, etc. etc..
Other companies aren't jumping on the $8 bandwagon because aside from a handful of titles, VIZ Media isn't making a whole lot of money on the SJ line. If they were really edging TOKYOPOP and Del Rey out of the market, you'd see those two companies attempt to lower prices as well, but things have stayed pretty stable since TOKYOPOP set the $10 standard nine years ago.
Viz didn't NEED to do the SJ pricepoint at 8 dollars, they just chose to. Givne the target audience's expected budget, the built in name recognition of Dragonball, and the cartoon airing of Yu Yu Hakusho and Yugioh and SHonen Jump magazine exposure, made these this far, far far more exposd and likely to sell than say, The Skull Man or Marmalade Boy from Tokyopop. And for a while it worked helping sell thousands more copies simply by being 2 bucks cheaper. Supply and demand always exemplifies price.
And besides, that pricepoint has moved up to 11 or 12 dollars across the board. Even Tokyopop books that were 9.99 when they set the pricepoint are 11.99 in the current printrun. Naruto has moved up to a solid 10$ for the most recent volumes.
I'm sure many of the titles in a Scholastic book order are that cheap still.
Its been well over a decade since I was in middle school and Scholastic had any sort of relevance in my life, so I'll take your word on it. But my guess is that Scholastic is a distributer that has no middleman, which gets special bonus incentives by going straight through government funded schools and thus instantly reaching millions upon millions more customers through school order sheets, than bookstores could ever hope to even begin approaching with single walk ins. On top of that, if they are a direct publisher and distributor, they get full profit on anything they sell and thus don't need the 50-65% markup anything else that goes through middle stores (like Wallmart) . And I still bet you'd be hard pressed to find anything under the 3 dollar pricepoint that wasn't a 24 page pamphlet.