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Originally Posted by djgreedo
I think you're dramatically underestimating the costs to the publisher and probably overestimating how much return they are likely to get from the ebook version (in the short term, which is all the shareholders care about).
Firstly, a publisher isn't going to hire a bored college student to do this work. Believe it or not they would hire professionals who would be getting paid a lot more than $10 per hour. On top of that hourly rate there are taxes, etc. You cost your employer a lot more than whatever your hourly rate is. And there will probably be at least 2 rounds of proofreading on the manuscript. And someone will need to format the ebook to the desired format(s) - again professionally.
I think several thousand dollars is a conservative estimate for getting a book into ebook format if the book wasn't already in electronic format.
When the publisher sells that ebook, some of the 'cover price' is going towards overheads, royalties, the retailer, etc. To recover the costs of creating an ebook they may have to sell hundreds or even thousands of copies. And ebook sales are still a tiny fraction of the book market.
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Believe it or not? I don't believe it, and with excellent reason. Instead of speculating about what they *would* do, why not just look at what many of them *are* doing? There is nothing remotely professional about the quality produced by some publishers. It is a simple scan and dump job with literally no proofreading. If you doubt this, consider the fact that I have one *series* of books in which one of the central character's name is incorrect, in a very obvious way, roughly 80% of the time throughout 7 titles, another 2 book series with exactly the same issue, though less frequently occuring, and a third which, when originally released, just cut off mid sentence about 10 pages from the end. Three different publishers.
This doesn't cost thousands. Actually, even $100s may be an overestimate. I can scan a book using our work photocopier in minutes - remove the binding then feed the whole lot in at once - so I'd be surprised if there aren't more sophisticated and task specific machines available that would do the same, and more reliably. Labour costs should be minimal given this is unskilled work.
Yes, the quality will be poor, but a poor option is better than no option.