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Originally Posted by starrigger
Turning a book manuscript file--even a clean one--into an ebook is a time-intensive process, far more than most people on this forum seem to realize. It's definitely not "a few seconds" as someone earlier said.
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The belief is that it's "a few seconds"
more than required for paper production, not that it's only a few seconds, total. That whatever process a publisher uses to format its books for print, could be adapted with relatively little effort to create two output forms: one print-ready, one ebook. Or three ebooks in different formats.
Conversion of raw text to ebook takes substantial time and effort for individuals because they're working with, well, raw text. Publishers aren't--they're working, at some point, with print-ready text, with whatever style & formatting arrangements work for them. They have a steady flow of books formatted with the same processes. If nothing else, I have trouble believing that making PDFs of all their books would take any substantial time per book.
However, even if an ebook requires starting from scratch, from the same base manuscript sent to the publisher, it doesn't take
more effort than making a pbook.
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As someone said before, the costs of editorial, art, marketing, sales and promotion, and a lot more are costs that will apply to any book, tree or e.
I'd like to see less expensive ebooks, too, but the notion that ebooks are a trivial expense to produce and sell is very much a myth.
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Production costs are the same, or roughly equivalent--right up to the point where the pbook is printed. At which point, the pbook gains a whole cluster of costs that ebooks ignore entirely: paper for pages, special paper for covers, binding, inventory tracking, packing, shipping, storage, sales packaging, possible return costs.
Charging the same for both implies that those costs are negligible or non-existent. Charging *more* for ebooks than paperbacks implies that either paper costs less than creating hyperlinks, or that publishers want to discourage ebook sales.