Not actually so. The canard that print books are not more expensive than ebooks comes from traditional publishers trying to justify high prices for ebooks, but

Not actually so. The canard that print books are not more expensive than ebooks comes from traditional publishers trying to justify high prices for ebooks, but it's not so. Costs for print books that are higher than ebooks: printing, shipping, warehousing, capital costs (sunk costs of a large print run meaning investment in books that might take years to sell or never sell). Another huge factor in the print book business is returns -- nearly all bookstores are consignment shops and regularly return up to 30% or more of the books shipped to them. It's the custom in the book business (to avoid shipping costs) that "return" means, the retailer actually destroys the books that aren't sold and gets a refund for them from the publisher. (Really!) Returns can add another 30% or more to the effective cost of print books sold in bookstores. (Returns are a smaller factor for bestsellers, one reason why traditional publishers are so focused on that corner of the business.) Remarkably, Amazon is one of the few retailers that tries to minimize returns -- they try to get smaller shipments from publishers so that they can avoid overstock. So why do traditional publishers say that ebooks cost as much as print books? (Booktrope is an online publisher focused on ebooks and print-on-demand paper books, and we certainly do not say that ebooks cost as much as print!) For traditional publishers, low ebook prices can undermine print sales. A big part of their business model is selling print books at high prices through bookstores. Lower ebook prices obviously are a problem for that model. Also, traditional publishers are used to a world where they have great connections with tastemakers and can persuade people their product is "better" than the competition. If you can do that, you can keep your retail price high -- like Apple does in the phone/tablet/computer world. But it's not working -- there are lots of great books being self-published and coming from non-traditional publishers these days, so, as the article says, big publishers are really starting to suffer from their own pricing policy of trying to keep ebook prices artificially high.