[MaggieScratch]

I'd love to see a dependable breakdown, rather than speculation, as to what percentage of the price of pbooks can be attributed to printing and distribution vs. digital conversion and digital distribution for ebooks. There ARE costs involved with the latter two, though not as much as for pbooks. Ebooks still have to be edited, proofread, laid out, and publicized, so those overhead costs are the same as for pbooks, and ebooks should bear their percentage of the costs, same as for pbooks.

In other words, I don't think it's entirely fair to say "the book is already edited and proofread and all you have to do is run it through Mobipocket Creator and put it on a server so it should cost half as much." If we want ebooks to be considered real books, that is, equal in stature to, say, a MMPB, then the publisher should be able to recoup production costs associated with ALL versions of the books (editing etc.) from ebooks the same as for pbooks.

Also, while even pbooks begin life as electronic texts, since the last round or two of corrections are done on galleys--which usually are laid out in Quark or Adobe or similar software rather than word processing software--it's not as easy as it might seem to get a good quality electronic text from the final proofread copy of a book. What you basically have is not text but PICTURES of text. At my job we often do printed and electronic versions of things like newsletters, and each version goes through separate rounds of proofreading, as they are laid out in two different processes and errors can occur in either or both processes. There has to be proofreading done AFTER layout and that probably goes for ebooks as well--which introduces yet another round of proofreading, of having to proof the final electronic text AS WELL AS the galley and making sure they match, if you want a quality product. And I think we all want a quality product in our ebooks just like in our pbooks.

While I agree that ebooks should cost less than pbooks, 50% for a brand-new hardback book is a bit much, I think. 25% sounds more likely. When the book moves to paperback, the ebook price should drop accordingly. Just like now, if you want to pay less, you wait for the paperback.

Any editors out there who want to weigh in knowledgeably on the numbers?