My point isn't that eBooks cost nothing to make (though I don't agree that getting an ISBN, going through distro channels, etc are causes for even a slight increase in cost) it's that those costs should not prohibit profit at $9.99. I do not believe that $10 worth of labor is involved in creating an eBook from a print book. Conversion to eBook formats is well documented, even for the Kindle and it's one-off nature.

But yeah I agree, eBooks don't grow on trees, but they also don't cost as much as a dead tree version.

I'm talking fiction, business books, basically anything that normally selling in the 10-20 buck range as paper.

Yes they're factors of book creation, but once paid out, aren't paid out again for each edition. I'll even grant there's some formatting that needs to be done moving from mm paperback to eBook, etc. but that's such a small amount I don't think it's worth the price difference. Not to mention the number of eBooks I've read with crap formatting from simply processing a word doc (or whatever) and not going back to check the formatting.

I'm sure Amazon will squeeze publishers, as Wal-Mart does. I'm certain they already are on dead tree books. But if $9.99 for a digital good is unprofitable, the model is broken, not the price.

The only flaw in comparing to iPhone Apps. The app devs made that bed themselves in racing to the bottom. Authors aren't setting the price of eBooks, nor are publishers racing to the bottom.

Now, of course, to be fair to publishers, you're estimation of how much work goes into a book is off. The costs that get eliminated for e-books are printing, warehousing, and shipping costs. Those are not the bulk of the cost of a book. Everything else, from editorial to copy-editing to type-setting to marketing, all of that still has to happen. So it's not that Sony or Amazon has to do more than $9.99 worth of work for a copy of a book, it's that the publisher does and the publisher can't sell the book to Sony or Amazon at a loss.

So if the $9.99 price point is successful and becomes the market standard that consumers expect, publishers are going to have to figure out how to make a profit on that, and simply eliminating printing, warehouse, and shipping costs isn't going to do it.

It's similar to the market standard of the 99 cent iPhone app, the price has been set regardless of any thought to the cost of production, which is why you can't sell games that are expensive to build on the iPhone, you simply can't make your money back at that price. But that's the price that has been dictated, so you either play ball or don't make apps for the iPhone.