[com2kid]

A number of authors have written about this and the tldr is that ebooks aren't really any cheaper to produce.

Paper is cheap. Shipping is cheap. The incremental cost of making a physical book is so small as to be noise in the overall book price.

[jgeada]

If that is true, of which I remain highly skeptical, then it implies that books are wildly inefficient to produce.

What on earth are all the middlemen between book being authored and it being sold to a customer that add so much overhead that the cost of printing and logistics disappears in the noise???

[com2kid]

> If that is true, of which I remain highly skeptical, then it implies that books are wildly inefficient to produce.

It just means that publishers are really good at manufacturing physical goods. They've been doing it for several hundred years so no big surprise there.

Books don't sell in large quantities. The economics of scale for the publishes for labor aren't there.

No one is getting rich off of fiction publishing except for the rare break out author. Publishers go out of business (or get acquired) all the time because they are constantly one step away from being insolvent.

This is also why the industry has massively consolidated.

I highly suggest reading breakdowns of the finances of publishing books, it is an interesting field that is incredibly different than how we are used to seeing numbers work in software.

[foldr]

The middlemen are giving your book some (still probably rather small) chance of being bought in significant numbers. If you just want a big stack of books and don't care if anyone buys them, they're not especially expensive to produce.

[maratc]

When you consider that different ebooks and different font selection can result in lines and pages breaking at any random place, ebooks may actually be more expensive to produce.

[jgeada]

Don't think I've ever read a properly produced ebook. Page breaks fall wherever and formatting is dictated more by my size/border/etc choices than by whomever "produced" then book.

Nevertheless automatic typesetting and formatting have existed for decades! TeX and LaTeX are ancient and produce better looking results than any book I've ever read on any of my ereaders, and those aren't the only tools in this space.

Whatever people are paying for such "production" seems wasted.

[maratc]

I converted ebooks into PDFs specifically formatted for my reader size and typeset in the fonts I like. It had proper kerning, hyphenation, widow/orphan control, drop capitals, etc.

However that PDF is not reflow-able (or changeable in any way) once it's on the device, and that's not what people are buying ebook readers for.