Thread: How much cost difference is there really?
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Old 09-23-2009, 05:47 PM   #26
fugazied
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga View Post
It is estimated that an ebook only costs 12-15% less to produce than a paper book.

However the retailer now has more server maintenance, higher bandwidth costs, more IT staffing, more backups etc.
The thing about costs for virtual devices is that it doesn't scale like print book costs do. You have costs setting up a server, but then you can store 10'000 ebooks on it. A print book contains a paper cost for every book, the server cost dilutes drastically as you add more titles and more ebooks are sold.

Also there are third parties who provide such infrastructure. The publishers don't need their own server farm, they could store ebooks on Amazon data storage. Hell I store 10 GB on Amazon servers for $2 a month. You can't tell me server costs are close to print costs for all of those books. Also the IT teams for these companies would probably be 10-20 guys. Compare that cost to the overheads on EVERY printed book.

I think the bottom line is that publishers prefer printed books because they are terrified of how to stop people copying/distrbuting ebooks on the Internet.
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