Quote:
Originally Posted by Simboubou
I discussed this with an small editor during a convention.
He explained that this idea of the "cost of an ebook" is almost nothing is misleading.
Copying a file doesn't cost much indeed, but to be fair the actual price of producing a paperback is quite low, too.
The price of a physical book is mostly to pay the author, the proofreader, the guy how created the text layout, the rent of the physical store, etc...
And while some of thoses expense don't exist for ebooks, others do : the price of developping (or buying) a website, the price of servers and maintenance, etc...
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It is not correct to say that the cost of an e-book is almost nothing. It is correct to say that the marginal cost of each e-book is next to nothing. Some of the fixed initial costs are of course common to both e-books and print books. But there are very significant costs of printing, warehousing and distributing each print book produced, which simply do not apply or are negligible in relation to e-books.