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It actually takes publishers more time to work on an ebook than they are getting back in income at the moment. I know there are exceptions to this, but the sales of ebooks mostly don't pay back the time invested in selecting an author, editing them, working with them for months or up to a year on the book, then the close edit, designing the book and cover, sending it out to a proofreader, designing the ebook and producing it and promoting it. Although we bring out ebooks as well as a print book, it actually takes me as long to edit it again because I re-edit the whole book each time there's a file conversion. A professional publisher can't have a book with typos. I also send it to a proofreader again. We redesign it because the design of a print book doesn't work as well as an ebook as paragraphs, section breaks etc, work in a different way on a screen. At the moment we really can't cover the amount of time we have to put into editing and producing an ebook by selling them, but it's important for the authors to have their books available as Kindles so we do it. It's easy to be cynical about publishers, but most do work while struggling to break even because they believe it's important to keep publishing outlets open. Publishers and bookshops are closing. It isn't a business rolling in loads of money from ebooks. A good edit is something many authors really want and it's incredibly time consuming. I'm certainly not earning enough from ebooks to pay for the time I'm putting into them and I'm sure many publishers are in the same position.
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