Several folks have implied that all (or most, or many) of the costs inherent in pbooks go away with ebooks. I would dispute that. Don't get me wrong, I think ebooks should be less expensive than they are now. But costs don't go away. Some costs are holdovers, some are new (this is not an exhaustive list):
- author payment
- publisher payment (this one might be the one that should go down)
- bandwidth cost for the connect store (they pay for every byte we download)
- backup costs - we want these things available for years, and I would get mad if I suddenly couldn't download books I bought - and the disk storage and backup costs are not negligible
- computers to host the site
- administrators to run the site
- programmers to write the software for the site (and the ones who are writing the stuff for the Sony Connect Reader stuff need to be paid less - that software reeks!)
I'm sure I'm missing some, but this should make the point that the brick-and-mortar costs and the paper/binding costs do not simply go away - they get shifted to other costs so other people can take their cut. Electrons might not cost anything, but the electron support network does.