I think this is the way books will be in the future. And I don't necessarily think that is a bad thing. Especially when it comes to textbooks. As long as the price of the book reflects the fact that there are no publishing and distribution costs.
I do wonder how much publishing and distribution contribute to the price of a book though? They aren't the only factors. There's the author, the editor, the typesetter, the cover artist, the marketer, the marketing, all sorts of things that go into the price of a book... And, the publisher wants to make a profit as well...
I wonder if there is any hard information about how much printing and distributing costs are and how much they add to the price of a book.
I've never asked for hard numbers but reading between the lines from what I do know about the system, I'm going to go out on a limb as suggest that printing costs are only high single digits of the cover price for a large run paperback, and maybe about 15% for a hardback. Very open to correction if anyone has harder figures, but I think these are in the right ballpark.
As you say, publishing houses manage a multitude of different elements of the overall production process, dealing with legal and adminstrative issues, copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, dealing with illustrators and other freelancers providing input, marketing, warehousing, negotiating with all the different parties, dealing with payments, running offices (rent, utilities, etc, etc), accepting back unsold copies, and so on. Doing things digitally removes/reduces quite a few of these costs but far from all. The larger/more professional your organisation in terms of marketing and distribution, the more expensive it becomes to maintain due to the sheer number of employees involved. Lean management only goes so far in trimming these costs.
Plus, authors need to make money and publishers need to make profits, as do booksellers and all the other people involved in the chain, or none will exist.
More fundamentally, like any commodity, there is no "right price" for a book to be, only a market price. Fortunately, the price the market currently tolerates is high enough to permit a large number of books to be brought to market every year.
It may be that a pure e-book publishing house may emerge with enough financial muscle to seriously challenge the traditional (and mixed) model, and therefore to alter the currently broadly accepted market prices for books. I think we're still a good few years away from that kind of paradigm shift; more people need to prefer reading from e-readers rather than paperbacks for this to happen. A historical example is that legal e-music didn't really take off until a critical mass of people owned portable music players. Only then was there a strong economic argument for publishers to go down that distribution model in a really big way as the alternative was to entirely cede that sales channel to illegal downloads.
For now, there isn't that kind of pressure, especially as I think that e-book retailers are now using agency contracts with the mixed-format publishers rather than the older wholesale model (which affects retailers' ability to cut prices, even though publishers actually get less money per e-book).
I do think that traditional publishing houses need to catch up with the electronic world though. Their marketing operations are a particular weak point IMO. I feel they tend to stick to quite traditional promotional methods, whereas the online world offers some much more aggressive opportunities.
