I, too, was once naive and thought that the price of goods is largely determined by the cost of production.

But as anyone who has taken Econ 101 knows, the price is based on what people are willing to pay for it. The cost of production merely dictates whether it is viable to sell in the market.

If most people are willing to pay $10 for an ebook, when the hardcopy is also $10, then $10 is what they'll sell it for.

>> An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen.

100% incorrect.

ebooks still:

- Have to be edited, proof read and formatted properly.

- Have to have a cover design.

- Unless you're distributing on your own website (which is uber rare), you still need to pay for platform fees and retailer costs for distribution.

- Marketing and tech support which is the same for any book, regardless of what platform its sold on.

Sure, it's easy to evaluate anything if you make up plausible-sounding numbers about it.

The costs of printing and retail are definitely less than half the sales price: https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-prin... Publishers say it's 10%; Derrico thinks they are underestimating certain logistical costs but no way it's 50%.

> 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.

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.

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.