|
-A- system is never touched by anyone, exactly. That's the whole point of redundant load-balancing. The image you use to clone instances is painstakingly designed by developers, but that's done once and then replicated to the thousands (or however many instances kindle requires) of virtualized systems.
There's certainly on-going updates to these images (or kickstarts, as they used to be called in the golden days), for instance when kindle added the lending system. But that's also done once, and then replicated on demand.
I'm not arguing that there are on-going costs to maintain a book, I was talking about the -cost- of each book. My $0.00004 example is what it all boils down to since that amount includes power, maintenance, hardware, bandwidth and storage. What it actually costs to maintain said hardware is included in that figure. That's the -cost per copy-.
What it actually costs to maintain a title I have no idea, but that's not up to the retailers but the producers of the book.
|