It seems many photographers who charge around $4K to $5K for wedding photography packages charge between $1K to $3K for large coffee table books.  Given that sites like MixBook allow you to create similarly sized albums for less than $100, I’m trying to understand what accounts for this huge difference.  Is the printing process fundamentally different (are many of these expensive books using a fundamentally printing process) or is most of the price difference coming from the fact that they arrange it and that everything associated with weddings has a huge markup.  Part of it may be that many people would be overwhelmed by MixBooks or wouldn’t have the digital negatives in time.

If there are some differences in the printing process, are their middle ground sites that are much more expensive than MixBook, but much less expensive than photographer’s books?