Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Do you have any insight into what it costs to run an online bookstore?
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Based on my background experience I have a good educated guess what server hosting and traffic will cost. The O'Reilly e-books are without watermarking so that O'Reilly doesn't have to save the e-books several times or generate each e-book individually. The complete data (e-books and videos) should be not more than 500 GBytes. For the worst case let it be 1 to 2 TBytes - for enterprise hosting this is still not so much data..
And don't they need the data, at least for videos, for the Safari subscription anyway?
Development costs for the website will be minimal because the shop won't change that much and the main topic will be maintenance costs. And the logistic for shipping the paperback books is not needed in that form anymore.
The most costs will be the support but they have the support for their Safari subscription anyway so they only have to extend their department a little.
So an e-book shop would be a niche market but should not be that expensive.