Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Ebooks will cut out printing costs, inventory costs and one middle-man (the distributors, like Ingram). However the retailer now has more server maintenance, higher bandwidth costs, more IT staffing, more backups etc.
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They don't cut out the distributors for the most part, big publishers don't sell directly to retailers like FW and BoB for the most part (Amazon and Sony appear to act as their own distributors). Lightning Source (was part of Ingram not sure if it still is) and Over Drive are distributors, among others and they supply books to the retailers. They get their distribution cut. There is also a fee that goes to the provider of whatever flavor of DRM is being used which gets paid on every sale.