Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Perhaps because people who make ludicrous assertions such as "ebooks cost virtually nothing to produce" clearly know absolutely nothing about book publishing. The majority of the cost of publishing a book comes from such things as copy editing. This has to be done for an eBook just as much as for a paper book. If you honestly believe that copy editors work for free, I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken.
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Like many other products. there are Development costs and there are Manufacturing costs.(I am leaving out Marketing/Hype costs which vary widely
)
I work in electronics.
4+ engineers spent almost 1 year developing and testing the circuit, software for a device that costs just $30 to manufacture in large numbers. (cost is not the retail price)
With e-books, the reader has to buy expensive specialty hardware/software to read the book. With print books, no additional equipment is needed.
Let me propose the reasoning that the real Pirates were the Publishers that have been consistently cheating the Authors on the number of copies sold through the mechanism of "return hold backs".
With e-books, the sales numbers are
hard numbers that can not be fudged. In order to keep their revenue stream intact and pay the Author their due, they
had to raise prices.
This even in the light of almost nil manufacturing costs (now just a server farm that serves the entire catalog).