[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Certainly not all mergers or acquisitions are successful, regardless of what the bankers tell you. This is a problem for the acquirers, and they are trying to make it a problem for the consumer.

Oh, absolutely. Those combinations are starting to unravel, witness TimeWarner selling Warner Books to Hachette, who relaunched it as Grand Central Publishing. TW discovered that the synergies were less easy to achieve than they might have thought (and had previously found that out the hard way when they were AOL TimeWarner, and tried to integrate online and print publishing assets.)

The acquirers are trying to survive. Publishing has been consolidating for decades, and acquisition of book publishers by multi-media conglomerates seeing synergies in having all forms of content under one umbrella is only the latest phase.

That's what I've been trying to tell you. There is a price point at which there will be a happy price medium between sales and profit.

I agree. But I suspect I think that "happy medium" is higher than you do. You're thinking in terms of the price you would like to pay. I'm thinking of the price the publisher might have to charge to do it at all, and suspecting that price may be higher than your preferred target. Then what?

Push the price higher than that medium and sales and profits drop, and piracy increases.

And the question is what that medium is.

Methinks ebooks are not worth as much as hard covers (and not even as much as mass market paperbacks), because of DRM and the current poor quality of presentation. And I think there are a lot like me out there.

There are, and I largely agree.

Not necessarily true for all. I personally buy hard covers because I much prefer reading a well-laid out book, which I can keep forever on my bookshelf. Again, I am not the only one -- just look at all the classics being re-released in hard cover.

I do the same, and have been gradually replacing MMPB editions with hardcovers to have durable reading copies.

The bottom line is, the technology has changed, and so the business model must change.

It doesn't matter how much publishers whine, they have to either adapt or perish.

I don't think publishing is dead, but some of today's large players will be. A few will adapt, and there will be a consolidation of the small epublishers in a few years.

The large players won't go down that easily. When you are units of multi-billion dollar corporations, you don't simply cease to exist. You may well transform.

And yes, I expect consolidation among ePublishers, too.

That's how business has always worked, and I don't see it changing because you or a few publishers don't like it.

It's not a question of what I like.

The fundamental underlying question in this discussion is "What should the price of an ebook be?", with the general opinion being "low" - certainly lower than the price of a hardcover, and preferably lower than the price of a mass market paperback.

My question is different: "What does the price of an ebook have to be, to let a publisher do it and make money on it?"

The answer to that question will vary depending upon the publisher and the book, but for reasons I've tried to discuss, I suspect it might be higher than a lot of folks will like.
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Dennis