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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Er, no. The biggest cost in printing aside from the paper is "set up and make ready", that is, creating the plates the book will be printed from, putting them on the press, adding ink, and running test copies to make sure registration is exact and color values (if the work includes color) are accurate. The incremental cost of printing additional copies once you've done that is a small fraction of the total. (And paper costs less when purchased in larger quantities, too.)
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These are all physical costs, which would not be required for eBooks.
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Economies of scale take place: the larger your press run, the more you can spread the cost of manufacture over units produced, and the less of a percentage of the cost manufacturing is for an individual book. If I print 5,000 copies and my printing cost is $5,000, my manufacturing cost is $1.00 per book. If I'm charging $5.00 for the book, printing costs are 20% of the price. If I print 10,000 copies, my printing cost doesn't double. It may rise to, say, $7,000, and my manufacturing cost per book is $.70 or 14% of the price.
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But the total physical costs have still gone up, and make the initial non-physical costs of editting/proofreading etc a smaller proportion of the cost.