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When the publishers are claiming that they're making less money per book with the ebook edition, I wonder how true that is. It's probably true with hardcovers, since I think it's pretty accurate that the wholesale price of hardcovers is about half MSRP, and the ebook revenue is 70% of the hardcover MSRP when there's only a hardcover edition. At that time the ebook is usually a couple dollars less than the discounted hardcover, so they're probably getting about a dollar or two less per ebook. I'm not sure whether the retailers get 50% off the mass market paperback, but if they do, that means they're getting 20% more for the ebook than they would for the paperback. So, if most buyers are price conscious, and weren't hardcover buyers in the first place (I'm not), and if the total books sold is roughly the same, the publishers are probably only seeing income/revenue down if most of the ebook buyers switched from hardcover to ebook (and even then, maybe not much), but they're probably not seeing a decrease if most of the ebook buyers switched from buying paperbacks.
On the other hand, with the increased competition from the low cost independents and all the backlist from published authors, they might be having a tougher time selling new books.
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