Got a telephone sales followup call from Createspace.com this AM. It seems that the createspace.com calculated costs (describe by me in an earlier post) are for a P.O.D. order. They are essentially the costs of a one-off printing of my book caused by an Amazon customer ordering a single printed copy.
There is a separate box that calculates a "multiple copy" cost per book printed. In my case, if I purchase directly more than one book, I would pay either $10.58 (stnd) or 6.29 (pro) for each book + shipping. I'm waiting for an additional call back from the customer service people for my account to explain the details of this feature.
It seems that an author/customer could pay the $39.00 onetime Pro fee, and then have books printed 10 at a time. Those books could be either sold from the author's website, off Ebay, or out of the Amazon warehouse. It would seem you could sell a trade paperback then for $11.99, deduct a cost of $6.29, adding shipping and net a royalty of $5.70 per book. It is true that this royalty is exactly the same you get off a POD sale. The difference is that the POD retail price must be $19.99 per book. I'm just guessing, but I think sales are more likely at an $11.99 retail price then a $19.99 retail price.
Once all points are clarified, I will BLOG that information to help others trying to understand how self-publishing in the POD world works and what options/variations are possible.
