If the college student would, after scanning and OCRing a book, go through the resulting file in meticulous detail and correct all the textual errors (as would be done by a professional production house, and quite rightly), I'm sure the cost of his effort would rise considerably. Have you read a poorly OCR'd book? Most I have seen are close to unreadable.

The misconception I hear too often is that online marketing, because it only takes a computer and broadband connection, is straightforward, automatic, and continues to wallow in the "if you build it they will come" school of thought. That philosophy stopped working around 1997.

Online marketing and promotion is a vast expenditure in time and therefore money. It is not cheap, it is not free, and most importantly, it keeps the author away from what they should be doing: writing more great books. The cost of a book, physical or otherwise, is not the book/file itself, it is a reflection of what took place before, during and long after its creation. Surely that's where the value can be found, not in the paper on which it was printed.

The conventional publishing distribution chain may involve a whole string of people and resources, but due to centralisation and volume, these are a small fraction of the total cost of creating and distributing a book. 