[cwyers]

There's two costs at work here -- marginal cost and absolute cost. eBooks don't reduce the absolute costs of any of Scalzi's books -- the work he and his editor put into it and the marketing expense, principally. But they do reduce the marginal cost, and so if you sell eBooks at the same price as physical books, that's more profit, split up however the parties involved agree to.

Scalzi's comparison to fountain sodas missed the mark -- the reason those cost so much more than the cost of the good itself is that the soda needs to cover the costs of owning, maintaining and providing utilities to the building where the fountain is, and the employees who work in that building. Amazon doesn't HAVE that kind of overhead, and they want to pass the savings on to the consumer. The publishers want Amazon to hold onto those savings (or share them with the publishers), so that Amazon can't undercut the other retailers who DO have that kind of overhead.

[justincormack]

Well there is a reduction, in printing, warehousing and perhaps pulping costs. For some books that is a lot, those on the long tail end of the book market in particular.

[deegles]

> Amazon doesn't HAVE that kind of overhead ...

Apparently servers, bandwidth, electricity and developers are free now?

[pbhjpbhj]

What do you think the relative costs of distributing 1,000 [one thousand] ebooks vs. distributing 1,000 paperbacks are? We're talking after all production costs, the book has been typeset and rendered to a print/ebook file on a publishers computer system.

Once set up what's the additional cost involved for the publisher in shipping the next 10,000,000 ebook files vs the next 10,000,000 paperbacks. Just the act of transferring the book from the computer system to the ebook reader or the owners bookcase.

I personally distributed > 50,000 computer files this month so far for a marginal cost of < £1. Getting 50,000 DL flyers printed would cost me about £1000 without distribution. It's not entirely comparable but I think it gives the flavour of the savings in production costs available to publishers.

[delecti]

Certainly not free, but the absolute cost invested in Amazon's ebook marketplace pales in comparison to that for their retail book infrastructure, and the marginal cost is nearly negligible for each new ebook they sell.

Similarly, both the absolute and marginal costs of producing ebooks for a publisher are nearly free (at least on top of the physical publishing process).

[cwyers]

I didn't say Amazon didn't have ANY overhead, I said Amazon doesn't have "that kind" of overhead where you have to actually have a physical retail presence everywhere you want to sell something. And in the case of eBooks, Amazon doesn't need to deliver a physical object at all.