Quote:
Originally Posted by GhostHawk
3 Ebooks cost virtually nothing to produce and ship, they are a digital copy.
The only legitimate cost of an ebook should be the authors royalty.
Period.
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This has been discussed here several times. Ebooks do take time to produce; conversion from print-ready formats to (non-print-sized-PDF) ebook formats takes editing skills and special programs. It's not a particularly difficult set of skills, nor are they expensive programs, but it's another phase of production that has to be budgeted, especially if done for many books.
NEW ebooks being produced at the same time as new books, have minimal conversion/production costs. They still have distribution costs--someone has to manage the sales, host the file exchanges, code the search engine and all that--but we pretty much agree those are substantially less than physical bookstore costs, and even less than warehouse inventory costs.
Ebooks made from not-new books are often made from scratch; the digital copy may not exist. (Even for fairly recent books. Publishers don't keep their print-ready copies hanging around indefinitely, waiting for the possibility that the book will need a reprint.) If the book's more than 10 years old, you can expect it has to be scanned, OCR'd, and (theoretically) proofread; there's a good chance of this if it's as little as 5 years old.
Scan-OCR-Proofread-Convert a book is, at a bare minimum, 5 hours of work--if you've got a crew of incredibly skilled technicians working on it, and the original is of a style/quality that scans well. An average novel, converted with an expected commercial level of skill, should take 7-15 hours. (Now, that's a one-time cost for as many copies as sell. However, it means they're not going to bother for books that won't sell, and they're probably putting money into advertising or other promotions to make sure it does sell.)
Textbooks or other strangely-formatted or image-heavy books would take a lot longer.
DRM costs money. I think DRM is basically a gov't-supported virus, but the fact is: it's common in the industry, and most forms of it aren't free. It adds to the cost of the ebook.
And publishers do have to consider: is the ebook sale a missing print sale? If it is, can they make a profit on ebook sales alone?