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There's one big difference:
There are certain constraints on the pricing of paper books beyond merely what the market will bear: for instance, as a book gets older, the demand for it usually drops, and if the publisher has money, warehouse space, taxes, etc., tied up in that inventory, then the publisher will reduce the price of the book in order to sell off those otherwise profit-eating copies. They have a good reason to want to unload remainders, shopworn books, unsold stock, and weird books that nobody will buy, for cheap. With ebooks, this is no longer the case. It doesn't cost the publisher anything to keep the files around. There are no piles of books sitting on the warehouse floor or being trucked off to the paper recycler. There are no used books, no lending to friends, and with the cabal, not even any retailer discounts. If you want the book, you can't hope to find it discounted, or at the rummage sale, or remaindered and sold to a discounter ... you can pay the full publisher's price (often more, sometimes much more, than the paper version) or you can go without.
Sure, that's profitable in the short term. But in the long term ... well, we're all bookworms here. How many of us got started with used books, discounted books, books with wonky covers, or strange books out of the bins at that discounter? I'd venture to guess most of us. Some of us still do. We spend the majority of our entertainment budget on books, and still don't have enough.
What the publishers are doing is reducing the number of books we can get for the same number of dollars. They think that by increasing the profit per book, they'll increase their overall profits. The problem is, books aren't the only game in town. If the people who are now buying cheap books are deprived of those books -- which is what the publishers are busting their butts to do -- they won't buy more expensive books. They'll buy other entertainment. There are lots of alternatives these days. You can buy several DVDs for the cost of a hardcover book. How many hours of video equal how many hours of text? For a lot of people, that answer to that equation is going to fall squarely in the video department. And when people aren't buying books, they're not encouraging other people to buy books. They're not teaching their children about books. They're not, in other words, long-term customers. Or, in the end, customers at all.
In short, instead of expanding their market, or even working to keep it the same size, the publishers are shrinking their own market. Business Fail 101. Then they'll blame "the pirates" for the reason nobody reads ... and never look where they should: in the mirror.
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