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I hadn't come up with an option for hardback without audio - as I said I was picking arbitrary prices to make an example.
The complete would be 20 dollars, delivered. So you'd get a hardback, and 1 data CD with MP3s on it. Or if you wanted, 24 dollars, delivered for the hardback, and audio CDs of the audio book.
And really on principle you aren't paying for the eBook at all. You buy the content and you can add the eBook on at a cost of 0. So yeah, it's 6 dollars for the eBook, but that'd perhaps get people away from saying "I'm paying for an eBook I don't want, I only want it on paper".
I don't think though that printing costs are as high as they may be made out to be. I also think that perhaps in the future there will be more POD (Print on demand) and more central storage of books than there is now. I would expect there's a lot of overheads attached to paper books - a complete guess as follows.
1 dollar to print the thing
Cost to ship it to the retailer.
Cost of having 10 bookstores, and having to make sure each individual store has stocks of a book - e.g. some might sell out, some might sell none. So there's going to be at least some degree of moving them about.
Shrinkage (which means damages, and theft - i.e. at a stocktake it isn't there, or it needs to be discounted as it's damaged or thrown out).
In other words the cost of the paper edition isn't all about the cost of printing it, there's (I expect) larger costs associated with stocking it, hiring a location for the store, staff, shrinkage, redistribution etc.
Perhaps as the online model moves away from this, minimising these costs then it really will be a case of costing 2 dollars to print a book and have it sent out. Sure larger books will cost more (more printing, heavier parcels) but your normal throwaway paperback can't be that expensive if it's a large efficient organisation.
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