[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by TheJohnNewton

This may be their fear but if so they have a limited grasp of reality. You can easily find copies of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or any number of other books available on the dark net. By releasing legal ebook versions they would at least give people the option of buying a legit copy. Not offering them does nothing to stop piracy. It just frustrates potential customers.

I concur, but I'm not the boss at a publisher.

BTW, I've seen lots of stuff on the darknet. No thanks. My standards for ebooks are set by the sort of work uploaded here. I'm not interested in someone's plain text conversion from a scanned paper book, and haven't time or desire to put it into a decent format. If I'm going to do that, it will be something I can legally share with others.

I don't see the problem? If they sell to Amazon or to Walmart or directly to Joe Reader and make the same per unit profit what does it matter to them?

Sales to distributors/retail chains are at a discount. The distributor and retailer also have to make money. Sales directly to Joe Reader will be at a higher price and margin, but as mentioned, they aren't set up to do that.

The article makes it seem that they have some fear that selling an ebook will bring lower retail prices but what they should be concerned about is what it does to their profit not the retail price. I don't get the emphasis on retail price. I could see the retailer being concerned about that but does it affect the publisher (assuming they are not direct selling to the end user.)

The retail price affects what the user will buy. See the commentary here on ebook pricing set unrealistically high. No way most users will pay as much for an electronic copy as they will for a hardcover.

Book selling is a retail business. Retailers need to sell X units of whatever per day to cover their costs. Retailers buy from wholesalers. If a retailer lowers the price on an item, that comes out of their margin. They still pay the wholesaler the same for it.

If there is pressure on the retail price, the retailer gets squeezed, and may be squeezed out of business. This is already happening in the book selling trade. Smaller independent bookstores are going out of business because they can't match the pricing offered by places like Barnes and Noble and Borders, and those outfits are in turn being squeezed by discount "warehouse" retailers like Costco and Sam's Club. Economies of scale: the more copies of books you can order from a publisher, the greater the volume discount you can get, and the lower you can price the books.

Ebooks add another wrinkle to the problem. In the computer business, one of the perennial problems is "Channel conflict". A computer manufacturer may sell through retailers, or Value Added Resellers, or direct. Dell is going through that as they attempt to sustain growth, because they want to sell through retailers, but the retailers are afraid Dell may undercut them selling direct.

Consider retailers selling paper books faced with competition from ebooks? They sell paper books. The publisher sells the ebooks directly. Depending on ebook pricing, the customer might get the ebook simply because it's cheaper, and bypass the retailer. The retailer sees possibility of going belly up, and isn't happy. Channel conflict. the publisher needs the retailer to sell paper editions, and will be concerned about adversely affecting them.

Until there is an easy method for bookstores to sell electronic editions as well as paper copies, and make money on it, this issue won't go away.
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Dennis