These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price. But if your hobby is making apps, then suddenly the same font will cost you 50 times more - for a single year.
I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars. Maybe if their licenses were more realistic, piracy would be less of a problem.
Do you have a citation for that?
Printing a book costs just about nothing, it’s astonishingly cheap to print a quality book in volume. Author royalties are not that high (I suppose famous authors whose name alone sell books is another story), then you have retail margins and overhead.
The top three book publishers’ have sales in the low billions with operating margins in the 10 - 20% range.
It is a healthy industry even if it is smaller than it used to be.
The one problem with books is that shipping an individual book to a single consumer costs a far more than printing the book, but there is zero shipping and zero printing costs for ebooks, just the retailer margin.
And as for the authors, most would make a lot more money tutoring for the same number of hours of effort they put into the book. Those appearance fees might make it better, but how many people get those?