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Actually I fully understand the monetary aspect. A 99c ebook brings the house/distributor 65c. The publisher takes 35 and of that 35 the author get about 3.5 cents.
Such numbers make sense in A physical world when hard backs range from $20-$60. 20 years ago.

Today there is very little in the way of marketing. Snag an LED billboard slot for $20 per week. On a two minute cycle. A bench for $200 per month. A sign on a bus for $50 a month. 6 books have had a national tv spot in the last 5 years. 2 from Steven King. This isn’t 2000, nor 1980.

The largest expense a publishing house faces today is physical distribution. Sending paper to a store. Without considering pre payment to the author and editor:
Ignoring scale of bulk discounts… the biggest heavyweight books cost under $10 to ship. Most are under $5.
So if the publisher spent $1 on a solo print and $10 to ship and $5 in electric (there’s almost zero human labour in printing books today) you got a grossly estimated $16 to make and deliver a book. They make $4 on a $19.99 book.
That $4 is split up almost identical to the digital version. 65% to the publisher. 15% to the editor, 20% to the author.
So selling a book on amazon in digital form that costs a few penny in distribution (once) shows that amazon is exactly in line with the long standing industry practices. It’s not the big book companies getting screwed. It’s the authors. Just as they were screwed with physical books.
Any publisher can open up a store online and sell their own digital books with a reader app. But they would still have to complete. Competition is something big publishers don’t like to do.
Consumers are far smarter today than ever. Services like the Amazon market, eBay, etc have taught people What distribution actually costs. Home printing has been around since the late 80s and many small authors have sold physical books in person. Myself included. Trade shows and conventions today in every industry are always host to booths of self publishers who print paper and bins at home. The average price floating around $10 for those “books”.
So I stand with my original comment. Does anyone expect actual sales on a $100 ebook? That cost nothing to distribute?!?

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And it’s easy to see why. Just follow the money. Here’s Amazon’s corporate dictate on the matter. I assume the major publishers get the same deal as the independents.

Follow the links to get the whole story, including the odd file size restrictions. Keep in mind that quite a few major publishers will refuse to accept one or more of the requirements for that 70% royalty option. That means they do all the work for creating that book, formatting it, publicizing it, paying the author and so forth, but only pocket 35 cents on every dollar. Amazon does little more than process a financial transaction and a file download and yet pockets the other 65 cents. If that is not robbery, what is?

I’ve grow tired of all those over the years who have whined about the high cost of ebooks from major publishers but who’re apparently too lazy to research the deal that Amazon offers those publishers. They aren’t stupid. They look what Amazon is offering to pay them and make a perfectly rational decision to limit their ebook sales. That means pricing them high. It’s not their fault ebook pricing is so high. It’s Amazon’s.

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Those self-published books that cost anywhere from free to $4.99 on Amazon are likely a much bigger part of the total publishing picture than we know. Amazon doesn’t report sales so we really don’t know how many of them are being downloaded and read.

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