I am glad you cleared that up because I was trying to reconcile how one loses money on selling a copy of an eBook being there is virtually no cost whatsoever in duplicating a bunch of ones and zeros.
Actually Amazon WAS losing money on the ebooks until this “price fixing” by the publishers. Because the real “price fixing” is what the publishers charge book sellers, traditionally, there’s a set price a publisher charges the bookseller for a book. Say $10 for a hardback, $4 for a paperback, whatever. Then the bookseller chooses what to sell the book for.
Amazon has always sold new hardcover books as a loss leader. For instance when the last Harry Potter book came out, Amazon sold millions of copies and did not make a penny on the sales, apparently their strategy was just to increase traffic to their site.
So Amazon would buy ebooks from the publisher for what the publisher asked and then discount them on their website. Amazon has the money to do this. It’s pretty clear they were trying to make themselves the major ebook player.
Since the price change that Apple and the publishers set, publishers are actually making less money per ebook in many cases but they get to control the price point. It’s in their interest to keep the “value” of a book high.
Whatever happens is going to be interesting but I don’t root for Amazon. Like Google, they’re a little too big and too.... all intrusive.