[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by screwballl

For paper books, get a text scanner that scans the pages of a book one by one or maybe 2 at a time, which converts it into either picture or text format (usually with existing OCR techniques), and from there a simple program, which even if it does not exist, can easily be programmed and created to convert that text into any format the ebook company wishes to use.

Done much of this? OCR is good and getting better, but is not perfect.

Depending on the quality of the source scan, there will be more or less errors, but there will be errors, which will require manual proofing against the source text to correct. (Ligatures are a particularly thorny problem.) That costs money.

And just getting it to text is insufficient. Once it is text, you need to add markup for things like text attributes and ToC links. There are tools to automate this, too, but they make assumptions about the input file that may not be true. (A good example being GutenMark.) Again, more manual work is required. That costs money.

From start to finish, the cost per ebook if converted from paper, is around $3-5 per book.

Don't you just wish. See above.

For newer books in the past 15 years, if the original book or author submitted it via digital format like DOC, TXT, RTF, PDF or something from a computer, it would cost less than 25 cents per ebook.

Dream on. The original source file may not exist. These days, the standard in publishing is to submit a Word document. The Word document is is worked on till an approved final manuscript, copy edited and proofread, is agreed upon. That gets imported to Adobe InDesign for typesetting and markup. The output from InDesign is a PDF file that goes to the printer, who feeds it to the imagesetter that makes the plates the book will be printed from.

In earlier days, submission was hardcopy. (And nobody submits in PDF. Manuscripts are subject to change, and need to be in a format which can be easily changed.)

Of course some publishers or authors are requiring some ungodly amount of royalties per copy which is why some ebooks cost $30, and others cost $3.

Royalties per copy are only one part of the cost of production, and do not account for the price differences you see.

So what we are seeing is several things here, most of which we have seen before and will see again:

1) Resistance to the ebook formats by various people in the publishing industry. Using scare tactics and generalities to scare people into continuing to purchase paper based books.

Such as? The publishers I know of are all well aware of ebooks, and the questions isn't "Should we do it?", it's "How do we make money doing it?"

2) They use cherry picked data and numbers to make it appear that they are making little to no money on any ebooks.
One company is showing numbers that just in the first 9 months of 2010, there has been $304.6 Million in sales, compared to the entire year of 2009 saw $164.8 million, there is OBVIOUSLY major profits being seen now.

There is nothing obvious about it. You quote total revenue. We do not know what the expenses were. It's quite possible to show revenue growth and still lose money.

First one I mentioned: International Digital Publishing Forum in conjunction with the Association of American Publishers (AAP). These are insiders using cherry picked numbers.
2009: $164.8 Million in US sales
2010: $204.6 Million in sales through Oct 2010

Second one I mentioned: Forrester Research Inc. that deals with independent and peer verified data.
2009: $301 Mil
2010: predicts $966 Mil. for the year

I've seen those reports. They are used internally by the industry to try to figure out what it going on. The intent is not to try to delude you.
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Dennis