Open Book Publishers’ Lucy Barnes and Rupert Gatti, in a remarkable post detailing their book-publishing costs:
[M]any of the conversations about the financial viability of Open Access book publishing are predicated on a single business model—that of the BPC [book publishing charge]—and they assume there will be no revenue when a book is published OA.
Like the other scholar-led presses, Open Book Publishers doesn’t charge BPCs—so they push back against the (understandable) fretting around the steep fees:
[I]f a BPC model cannot support Open Access for books in a fair and sustainable way, it isn’t Open Access that should be thrown out—it’s the BPC model.
Also interesting: Their bottom-line total costs are around $7,000—a fraction of the $30,000 to $50,000 Ithaka S+R found in its 2016 study of university press costs.