Most of the costs involved in publishing a book come up front, before the publisher makes a dime.

For a successful author, the publisher has to pay an "advance on royalties," which is essentially a futures contract. If the book bombs, the publisher loses money. If it's a New York Times Best Seller. the publisher makes money, if the advance wasn't too big. After publication, the typical royalty is about fifteen percent of the price, and the costs vary only on delivery. For a physical book, the cost to print, store, and ship a hardcover book are around three to three and a half or four bucks, depending on how fat the book is. Paperbacks are slightly cheaper, but only slightly, and one has to take into account "returns," a deal the seller makes with a retailer (a bookstore) which guarantees that the publisher will buy back any unsold copies. In practice, most "returns" are simply destroyed and the bookseller sends back the cover only (to save on shipping costs, since it couldn't be sold as a new book) although other options exist, such as taking back physical stock and sending them off to "remainder" outlets, who offer discount pricing. Electronic books, of course, don't incur the physical costs, but everything else is exactly the same, so in a perfect world, an eBook would be worth exactly that small difference less than the paper version.

Unfortunately, many people exaggerate the "savings" to the publisher, "reasoning" from the fact that "printing" an eBook costs very little to the conclusion that eBooks "ought" to be very nearly free.

But then you have to consider the costs for the acquisitions editor, who decides whether a book looks promising enough to take a flyer on, the development editor, who works with the author to bring the project to fruition, proofreaders, coders and/or editorial staff who develop the book for final publication, arranging an artist for the cover, arranging for the blurb on the back cover, a forward, chasing down errors, potential legal liabilities (mustn't forget a lawyer or two), publicity staff, who arrange for reviews, author appearances, advertising buys, product placement on talk shows, free copies for talk radio hosts, cable tv hosts, and so on. At that point, it doesn't really matter whether the book is destined for the paper print market of electronic publication, because almost every book these days is created as an electronic file, and then converted into whatever makes the most sense.

The people to whom it makes the most difference are the people who sell physical books, and bookshops are going out of business with great regularity, because of eBooks, as well as competition with huge discount operations like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

I'm fond of bookshops. One can wander the aisles and find little treasures, talk to knowledgeable professionals who can advise one on similar books to those you particularly like, be attracted to creative covers, talk to authors during signings, and engage in a vast range of social activities and interactions that are simply impossible if one "navigates" to a web site.

I'm not fond of eBooks, as a general rule, especially self-published eBooks, because:

1. They have no weight or texture. However clever the design, they don't feel like paper, and the screen has no sculptural depth, the way a printed book from real type does, where the ink is very slightly embossed into the paper.
2. They're all the same. There's a difference in the real world between an atlas, or a "coffee table book," and a poetry chapbook, or a comic book, for that matter. If variety is the spice of life, you've just settled for a block of Velveeta Processed Cheese Food.
3. Despite the efforts of Amazon.com and others, one can't really "loan" them to anyone.
4. You can't sell them, so it's difficult to say that one really "owns" them, and what one really has is a license to read a particular book on a particular class of device, and tough luck if the devices ever change, because you'll have the electronic equivalent of an Eight-Track tape or a floppy disc.
5. Because they tend to be published on a shoestring, the quality control tends to be crap. I don't like typos in text any more than I like roaches in my salad.
6. Thus far at least, it's impossible to make an electronic pop-up book, or include a "scratch and sniff" scent sample, or emboss a cover, or include die-cut peek-a-boo illustrations, or any number of physical tidbits that add variety to real books.

On the other hand:

1. They allow unpublished authors to create and publish their own books without involving the vultures of the rip-off "vanity" publishers. I'm in favour of that, taking all in all.
2. They allow authors to serve niche markets which would never support a traditional author / publisher / reader relationship. ePublishing can be literally one-to-one, or one-to-very-few. This is a good thing too.
3. If you're going to Mars, it's very easy to pack up your library.

The publishers have a very real beef with eBooks, and many authors do as well, because eBooks are cannibalising the cooperative relationship between readers and the traditional publishers and booksellers who supply the trade. Publishers and booksellers are fighting for their lives, when one thinks clearly about the issue, and so are desperate. If the bookshops go out of business, eventually the publishers will follow, and the beautiful edifice of true literacy will start to wither away.

I'll miss it.