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Originally Posted by teh603
Wait, how are the costs of printing and shipping only 10~20% of the cost of a printed book?
Take the raw document, run it through a data processing engine like Smashwords and Bookie Jar have, and then five or ten minutes later you have ebooks in all major formats and probably the minor ones as well.
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One of Stross' points is that
a manuscript is not a book. The original draft manuscript needs editing, proofreading, and formatting--if the author does these herself, she's absorbing those production costs; a publishing company has to pay out of pocket for them. It needs a bookcover; ditto. It needs an ISBN number. If it's being published by someone other than the author, it has to be worked into their schedule and advertising system; more costs there. It needs a blurb, the bit next to the book in ebook stores, or on the back cover for print books, to give potential buyers a reason to fork over their money. (Many authors are atrocious at writing their own blurbs. They know too much about the book to figure out what's appealing to someone who hasn't already read it.)
Believing that the hour or so it takes to format-for-Smashwords is the complete production time misses a lot of the work that should be going on between "I have a finished story" and "this is ready to sell to strangers."
Editing's top of the list, with bookcover a close second; there's a lot of rough drafts on Smashwords. Because of this, I don't buy anything there without sampling it, unless I know I love everything that author writes. (Which IMHO counts as sampling--I already know they write things I'm happy to read.)
Formatting's also part of that. While an experienced desktop publisher can convert for Smashwords in an hour or two, the first time will probably take quite a bit longer--and any complicated book will also take longer. Converting for sales in other stores takes more time, and not everyone will be happy with Smashwords' feeds to other stores.
Formatting for print, even print-on-demand, is a *lot* more work. For that, you have to start dealing with fonts, line heights, kerning, and problems with orphan words on pages. And high-resolution art for the cover; an 850x550 pixel image won't work.
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What you're *not* having to pay for is paper, ink, people to run the printing machines, amortization on those printing machines, glue, the guy who runs the binding machine, amortization on the binding machine, the guy who packs the books into shipping cartons, the shipping cartons themselves, each stage of shipping (and believe me, that can add up), customs fees if you print overseas, and a hella lot of other stuff.
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Nor the accounting that keeps track of all those things. I agree that the publishers' blithe statements that the print-and-ship part is 10-20% of book costs are suspect--maybe that's "per full-price hardcover with a print run of over 20,000." (They very carefully don't mention print run sizes when they talk about costs.) They also very carefully never discuss MMPB production costs, where the editing is already done and the marketing is minimal.
But those costs don't mean that the other parts are minor; most of the time (which is paid time for *someone*) involved in mainstream publishing happens spread out over many months before it ever hits paper.