[pete_1967]

Few things publishers' conveniently ignore and no article about ebooks I have read so far has brought up are:
* Although you can order books from online retailers, their ability to deliver to your location, and delivery cost of physical item is restrictive factor to convert interest to sales, with ebooks there is no additional delivery cost thus making them immediately available for everyone who can afford the cost of the book, but delivery charges making them unaffordable.
* Especially if an author is unknown, I can still sell unlimited numbers of ebooks at $1, and am more likely to sell those, than 1000 printed ones at $10. And if the book proves popular, there is no additional cost of selling another 1000 ebooks, but there is to sell printed ones.
* My distributors are more likely to take on for sale every book I publish because additional storage costs are practically nill as opposed to physically store copies of books that are unlikely to sell. While back office costs are (basically) the same for both products, my losses for failed release are less. In addition to that, I rather sell 1001 ebooks at $1 than 100 printed ones at $10.
* Once I publish an ebook, I never lose a sale, whereas with printed products I can lose a sale in many ways, one being out of stock and customer not that desperate to have a copy that they would wait for the order - I rather sell that copy for a $1 than not sell one at all.
* Better availability, lower price ==> increased readers ==> more sales now and in future. If I read a great book, I recommend it to my friends, they may want to buy a copy too, if it's unavailable, I probably loan mine to (one at a time) them <== no revenue to the publisher but if it is available as an ebook at reasonable cost ==> extra revenue to the publisher ==> more people recommending the book ==> more ebook sales ==> rinse and repeat.

Of course, it is better for publishers to be quiet about above, because they wouldn't be able to justify their ebook pricing if they did.

I think the biggest barrier for lower ebook prices are the local publishing rights that are fair and valid with printed books, but it's only a question of time when the first global ebook publishing house becomes reality leaving local publishers to deal with only printed copies, specialising books that are not viable for ebook publishing (e.g. photography books) or killing them off completely. What will be interesting is to see whether that will be one completely new, or whether one of the current houses starts to buy global digital publishing rights for all their books and removes geographical restrictions from digital versions once and for all. My bet is former - just like Amazon came outside of old establishments and became the biggest in the market.