Quote:
Originally Posted by ratinox
The costs associated with keeping ebooks "in print" are substantial. Server farms that provide storefronts and downloads have substantial up-front costs and on-going costs as equipment is replaced and upgraded. They require electricity for power and cooling. The buildings which house them have leases and property taxes. The programmers who write and improve the storefront software have salaries to be paid. So do the QA people who test that software and the system administrators who deploy the software and maintain the infrastructure.
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The cost to maintaining an ebook store is pretty minimal compared to the cost of maintaining 2000 Barnes and Noble brick and mortar stores.
I suspect that the cost of the ebook section of Amazon's overall online store is pretty minimal. For that matter, the cost of maintaining a 1M+ hit per day website is a lot less than you might think. It doesn't actually require a huge data center.