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Originally Posted by taustin
Not according to at least one professional author. Charlie Stross said in his blog that the cost of putting ink on paper and getting it in to our hands is maybe 10% of the total price. The average book requires about a year of effort on the part of the author, and an equal amount of time on the part of the publisher's staff, between editing, typesetting, proofing, etc. So 10% less than the current edition is entirely reasonable. More than the current edition is, as everyone agrees, ridiculous, of course. But ebooks are not nearly as cheap to produce as many people believe, because most of the process is exactly the same.
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10% of first edition hardcover I can understand, that still falls within the $3 range of my estimate, since many first run hardcover books are $25-35. After the book has been out a while, they use cheaper paper for the smaller softcover editions, usually by this point the book has already covered all costs needed to create it from start to finish, and everything else is more or less profit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/books/15ebooks.html
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Amazon.com, which sells electronic editions for its Kindle device, has effectively made $9.99 the de facto price for most best sellers, a price that publishers believe will reduce their profit margins over time.
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So that says it right there, some publishers keep ebook prices artificially high to encourage purchasing the paper version, which they "claim" to make more profit off of. But when you see that $3 covers the cost of scanning (many commercial scanners can scan thousands of pages per hour and automatically convert that to digital text we now see as an ebook).
I agree it is about time to start another 9.99 boycott like mentioned here:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/04/kindle-readers/