If it really is costing 80% of the cost of a book to bring it to market, no wonder the Publishing industry is going out of business.
But lets look at what we know to be true about publishing.
1. Only about half of the suggested retail price of the book goes to the Publisher and Author, the rest is for the book store (which often discount new hard backs by 10-30%).
2. Built into the cost of the book is the knowledge that a significant number of even best selling novels (with the possible exception of Harry Potter
) are going to be returned to the book seller. I think I read that the publishers assume about half the books they print will be returned. So that $2.00 above is more like $4.00 per book sold.
3. As others have rightly pointed out, if the claims were true of hardbacks, then book companies should surely go out of business by printing paper back copies of the book. This is especially true of midlist authors whose works often start with paperbacks.
4. Lets be honest, a lot of the copy editing can be done by automated computer programs these days.. and considering the number of mistakes I see in many modern novels, many publishing companies seem to end copy editing with the computer program.
Ultimately, I think the basic problem is that Book Publishers are still bound to an old model of doing business; a model that is grossly inefficient, is built around the blockbuster book and terribly run brick and mortar book stores. I can see numerous places where the costs could and should be trimmed dramatically.
It would help if I knew how much profit that companies like fictionwise and booksonboard makes on each book, but lets assume for the moment that we keep the custom of them selling the books for 200% the wholesale price. If we only work with the $2.00 claim, then e-books should be $4.00 cheaper than the hard back version of the book. If we look at the $4.00 per book sold (since extra books aren't printed), we are looking at ebooks being $8.00 cheaper per book.
I think ultimately it comes down to this, the vast majority of the publishing industry doesn't know how to sell books. Sure they can sell a book... given a million dollar marketing budget. Whats worse, most of the books that get all the attention these days, well frankly suck.
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Bill