> I have never written or published a book, but my understanding is that the cost of writing the book far outweighs the cost of actually printing it. Human time

> I have never written or published a book, but my understanding is that the cost of writing the book far outweighs the cost of actually printing it. Human time and knowledge is way more costly than some paper and the effort of a machine that spits out books by the second. Usually physical books are said to be expensive because publishers are the ones holding the rights to them. They pay the authors in advance and try to recoup the cost later, with prices as high as the market will bear. The publishers have some fixed overhead in payroll (for editing, typography, art), printing, marketing, etc. Add to that the risk of the book not being finished by the author and the publisher's profit margin and it goes some ways to justify their pricing (or at least it makes it understandable). The authors then get only a slim percentage of the sales (if at all). In this case the book isn't even finished, the full proceeds go to the authors (or so it seems) and the readers are expected to advance the money themselves to offset the costs of writing it. The overhead is vastly diminished, there's no publisher, the authors incur no risk, and yet the price is much higher. Makes no sense.