Part of the issue is print-on-demand and drop shipping. In the old days, you had to stock and distribute inventory as well as do large-batch printing runs in or

Part of the issue is print-on-demand and drop shipping. In the old days, you had to stock and distribute inventory as well as do large-batch printing runs in order to get books out at a price and delay acceptable to consumers. This is in short why publishers exist - to identify potential quality products and take on the financial risk of generating an inventory to sell. The modern structure pioneered by Amazon removes all that. The actual cost for a seller to make a listing is apparently half a cent per month. After the first 100,000 listings, that is, and only on SKUs without a sale in the last year.