You're right. The really sad thing is that I had it correct, but believed my grammar check when it suggested "past".

read passed the title of my post, then you owe me five bucks for the benefit of my wisdom. I'm just going to presume that everyone who posts after has read my post... I'll be in touch.

30,000 is nothing. Maybe, maybe you need to replace the drum. Of course if it's not made anymore...

Any laser printer should last just shy of forever. These are simple, simple machines. You're not printing enough to really worry about incremental costs. Just buy a cheap, popular laser.

It's a bit worse than that I think. Stated costs do not include:

• Cost of floor space.
• Time-value of money tied to supplies.
• Reprints of defective titles.
• Cost of multiple skilled employees dedicated to running.
• Maintenance.
• Insurance

Also, for an "I want it now!" service it's really, really slow. As the service get's popular, the line gets longer and it becomes less useful.

The skill-sets and equipment necessary to sell books are completely unrelated to what's needed to manufacture them. The idea of books being printed in the bookstore is completely awesome and completely impractical.

What would be good is POD manufacture then ship next day. Practical, cheaper, reliable, better quality. I'd buy it.

Amazon wants to protect their business model. That's what the Kindle is about really. They had to have it out there before someone else does a reasonable E-Book model.

Amazon is modeled after traditional book distribution. They think they deserve 65% any time they touch a book. This is why you have the supposed "average" price of $10. Amazon takes $6.50, the author gets paid a $1.50 and the publisher has $2.00 to pay for editing, marketing, and overhead... which is just barely workable.

If the price was $5.00, then Amazon takes $3.25, the author gets $1.50 and only $.25 is left for the publisher... not enough to do /anything/ really.

As long as Amazon is so greedy, we won't see $5.00 Kindle books. But they are seriously leaving themselves open to attack by insisting on taking such high margins. If enough alternative E-Book hardware gets out there, then someone will come and seize the market overnight by offering a reasonable deal to publishers. Thus the rise of the virtual Kindles ala iPhone Kindle Reader: they have to remove reasons for people to try alternative systems so that they can milk this for as long as possible.

I just put up a website (www.openyourtextbook.com) to sell printed copies of CC / open textbooks last night. Did this largely because of the CK12 books. I don't have very much content there yet, but you /can/ buy the CK12 textbooks, and I'm starting go through some of the other open textbook organizations looking for good content. The website needs a lot of work to be scalable, but before I do that work, I want to make sure it needs to be scalable. If you have a good, free textbook, I'd love to make it available. I can produce them for much less than the options discussed above. The books will be soft cover with B&W interiors.