Oh, I I understood what you were saying, rlauzon, I'm just pointing out that if the producer has to eat enough of those little bits then the remainder gets too small to be worth his while to do the work.
I.e. if he chrome plates 5 different types of widgets and eats $1 of the cost on each of them then his profit drops from $10 to $5. If that $5 isn't enough for him to mess with, then he stops messing with it. That's all I was getting at.
Because he eats that $1 he takes home $1 less per widget. If his 'salary' is $50k and he makes/sells 10k widgets and eats $1 on each of them, then his salary drops to $40k. If he can live on that, and is willing to do so, then fine, if not ... well, nobody gets widgets from him, chrome plated or otherwise.
For widgets, that's not that big a deal, usually someone else is making something comparable. But books are a bit different, usually a given book is only going to be written by a given person, so this would mean it just didn't get written at all. Imagine if Shakespeare had decided that he just couldn't make enough money from writing that "Romeo and Juliet" thing.
As you point out, e-book margins are pretty thin, but I don't know that they'll be
that much thinner than p-book margins, from the
author's standpoint anyway. So a lot of folks might be dissuaded if we the consumers expect the prices to be too much lower than the paper price. I guess that's my overall point.
