Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
And yet somehow you forget that it's not just the build out that cost, but there is a big monthly expense for all that metal.
Yea, it only cost a couple of cents to jump in the car and drive to the store, but that ignores the actual expense of owning a car - car payments, insurance, maintenance - it's not just the gas to get you from point A to point B. Data centers are the same way. Sure the data storage used for an eBook is trivial, but actual data centers, with electricity, purchased hardware, purchased bandwidth, personal and the like costs a lot of money on an on going basis.
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I'm not forgetting it, just that it is minimal
a) for eBooks, b) for Amazon, compared to the cost it would be for other media, or other companies.
Market share matters. Setting up a brand new eBook business would be very costly, because you would need almost as much infrastructure for a small small market share as for Amazon's huge one. So your cost per book would be much higher. Again, it scales well.
And Amazon already has all the hardware in place for its other operations. If it were to stop selling eBooks right now, but keep all the rest of its businesses going, how much cost would that save? Not much.
You've already got the car and are making hand over fist with high end limo service. You make a bit more doing uber eats on the side.