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Originally Posted by melchioe
Several folks have implied that all (or most, or many) of the costs inherent in pbooks go away with ebooks.
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It's not an implication. It's fact.
- author payment - With paper books, that's $1 per book.
- publisher payment (this one might be the one that should go down) - Since publishers no longer have value, this payment goes away.
- bandwidth cost for the connect store (they pay for every byte we download) - Spread out over all the books sold, this cost is small. How much bandwidth does Google take up? And they only make money from Ads.
- 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 - No, but they are extremely small. Disk storage is very cheap today.
- computers to host the site - Small. It's spread out over all the books, plus all the other sites being hosted on those computers. Large data centers keep these costs very low.
- administrators to run the site - Goes with the computer costs.
- 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!) - Software is already written. Companies like Fictionwise are already using it. Even if the company wants to have customer software, it's still spread out over all the books sold and is very small.
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Originally Posted by melchioe
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.
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Facts:
- Paper costs more than electrons
- Making a copy of a pBook significantly costs more than making a copy of an eBook.
- Transporting a pBook to a customer costs far more than transporting an eBook to the customer.
- The eBook market cuts out the useless middleman of Publisher - who takes a large cut of the profits of pBooks.