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Originally Posted by AHMavrick
The print costs have already been amortized in the printing of the book whether it goes HB to PB or straight to paperback.
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Are you talking about new or backlist?
If it's backlist, perhaps the book broke even back in the day. Releasing it as an ebook incurs its own costs, including conversion, formatting and proofreading; it's not necessarily a huge sum, but it does have to be earned back. Plus the retailers and authors get their cut. So if you spend $10k on the conversion, price it at $10, and make $3 profit per ebook sold, you still need to move over 3300 units just to break even -- actually more, once you start figuring in taxes.
If it's new, and you release the ebook at the same time as the initial printing, then the ebook -- in addition to incurring its own costs -- is cannibalizing paper sales. Nor is there any sort of guarantee that a specific paper book is going to break even.
Plus, the reality is that the printing part is currently a small part of the costs of the book -- ballpark is 10-15%. The rest is the author's advance, royalties, editing, proofreading, marketing, taxes, overhead, retailer's cut, etc etc
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Originally Posted by AHMavrick
The bottom line is that I am willing to pay 50% of the normal cover price for a paperback for an e-book. That's what I pay for used books now.
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Sorry, that's not going to happen. New ebooks are almost certainly going to stay in the $10-$20 range. Backlist will likely stick to $7-10.
The cost savings are nowhere near significant enough to slash book prices by 50-75%.