[extra88]

> Amazon charges authors $0.15 per megabyte of book file size per download

But they don't charge you anything to store the book, right? Charging something for the download is presumably necessary to discourage gaming the system and the rate chosen is meant to encourage books they consider the right size which may penalize (intentionally or not) image-laden books.

I'm not arguing that that Amazon's policies are right or that "Unlimited" makes sense for authors (or readers), just that there are good reasons to charge something.

> On AWS, you're charged $0.15/TB of bandwidth out

Where did you get that? Data out starts at $0.09/GB, goes down to $0.05/GB for big customers and presumably can go down even further for even bigger customers but not 300x cheaper.

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

[DanielDent]

Using Amazon as a benchmark for bandwidth prices is not a good starting point.

Amazon charges are $x.xx/GB. Providers which compete on bandwidth costs charge $x.xx/TB.

300x cheaper than Amazon is a little difficult, but 50-100x cheaper is a price at which bandwidth can be profitably sold.

[nateberkopec]

You're right, I have no idea where I got that figure. Editing.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

I believe that was the number tossed out (with proof) for hosting services bandwidth prices, in a discussion here about a month ago.

Edit: sortof - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11301085

(Bitterness: found by googling site:ycombinator.com bandwidth price hosting , because that search in-site does not work, because the one that once did was ignored/chased away. Must be some badge of honor like Apple's and Microsoft's app stores - "dismal search, we haz it".)