Eagles Over the Kennebec

um. Publishing is one of areas with substantial fixed costs (which are the same no matter how many copies you sell) and per-unit costs. Per unit costs: paper, distribution, and most importantly RETURNS (I'd love it if Sharon would care to explain what effect this has on costs as clearly as she has above). So - at low numbers the per unit costs are a relatively low total amount, and it is possible to say removing them doesn't do that much for the publisher's costs. At high numbers of course the fixed costs (which are the same regardless of whether the book sold 10 copies or 10 million) are divided by the number of books. At which point the per unit costs are far far larger than the fixed costs. It's not actually an 'all books'simple picture.