"If amortized editing and design costs are really the lion's share of a physical book, the system is deeply, deeply broken."
Why? I doubt that there are numbers for it, but my impression is that, in general, the mass creation of physical objects has been steadily getting cheaper, to the point where sometimes features are added to things solely in order to make them expensive enough to be worth selling. Whereas time-intensive tasks that require intelligent people have on the whole declined relatively little, in the areas that can't be automated. And unlike other time-intensive tasks, native English proficiency is not something that can generally be outsourced to intelligent people in countries with lower wages.
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Why? I doubt that there are numbers for it, but my impression is that, in general, the mass creation of physical objects has been steadily getting cheaper, to the point where sometimes features are added to things solely in order to make them expensive enough to be worth selling. Whereas time-intensive tasks that require intelligent people have on the whole declined relatively little, in the areas that can't be automated. And unlike other time-intensive tasks, native English proficiency is not something that can generally be outsourced to intelligent people in countries with lower wages.