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Steve Jordan - even though as I understand it you are in the business, what you are saying cannot possibly be true. Most books these days are retailed by giant chain stores, either book specialists such as Borders, or general merchandisers like Costco and Walmart. They are more powerful than the publishers, who cannot dictate to them. Further, they get to force the publisher to repurchase the unsold copies of books.
So actually selling to retail is very high stakes and uncertain for the publishers because they cannot know for sure how many paper copies will sell, and it is quite expensive to distribute a paper copy that winds up not getting sold.
Also, although the costs of producing the books may not be great, the retailers take a huge percentage of the final price to pay the bricks and mortar cost of selling: the sales staff, the rent, the utilities, insurance, profit, etc. Most of this retail cost can be avoided through electronic distribution.
Because the incremental cost of selling electronically is near zero, it should be a no-brainer to push e-sales over paper sales, especially paper sales from regular stores. The only explanation that I have heard as to why publishers seem to be avoiding electronic sales is the fear of piracy.
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