Quote:
Originally Posted by Maggy J
The issue is that the book has to be recoded for the various ebook formats which has to be done by someone who will usually want some dosh for the effort. All this over at the Gutenberg site, have been done by volunteers for de nada.At Amazon people want paying.
However my complaint in the past has been when the kindle version costs more than the paperback.  |
That doesn't make sense. A hardback is typeset, then a few months later the paperback has to be typeset again, but in all cases the paperback is cheaper, because the cost of production is lower (cheaper materials, higher volume, lower distribution weight).
Even if an e-book has to be typeset separately for Kindle, Nook and whatever else, the final cost of production is lower because there are no physical materials or distribution involved. The reason they aren't cheaper is because the publishers are trying to protect their market. In many cases they have large stocks of printed materials that they want to shift (warehousing costs money too). They may also be trying to protect favourable terms with high street book sellers. But whatever is driving the price of ebooks artificially high, it isn't the typesetting.