DiapDealer:
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People can talk about what ebooks should cost until they're blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is... they will always cost exactly what the majority of people are willing to pay for them. They may get a little cheaper, but they're never going to get anywhere near their production costs.
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Just because this has been brought up a few times already I'd like to point out that the intent of this thread is not to argue over how much e-Books should cost.
HellMark:
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There are costs associated with ebooks that paperbooks do not have. Paper doesn't have server fees, DRM licensing fees, bandwidth expense, etc. Explain how your argument makes sense. Also, while you claim that ebooks production cost approaches zero, it will never reach zero, even if you factor out the staffing and utility costs. There are still continual expenses with ebooks, that apply for each copy sold (such as the DRM licensing).
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Kolenka
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EDIT: Fun fact... printing accounts for ~10% of list price. So on a book that lists for about 10$, the eBook savings are ~1$ on printing (- cost of a formatter/etc to put manuscript into ePub/etc). Distribution is another 10% (and bandwidth/etc offsets those savings).
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You two are either being disingenuous, or you have no idea what you are talking about. You're going to try to tell me your bandwidth factors into the cost? I mean a gigabyte of data is only going to cost a server company around 15 cents (and that's generous for a lot of cases). The average eBook is 1-5 megabytes, which means the bandwidth cost is a fraction of a cent. And a small fraction at that.
You're telling me that DRM licensing is a per-book cost. That is something I was not aware of, and you didn't mention how much this would cost, but a lot of publishers use their own proprietary DRM so for them again, it is $0.00 to attach DRM to a book.
BTW: server fees, IT fees and others are costs that Publishers and Distributors of ANY book, electronic and paper, have.