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As long as Book Publishers behave in much the same way as the Music & Movie industry, they are fighting a losing battle.
Treating customers like your enemy:
- encrypting your books (which we all know is a joke, after all, to READ the book you need to give out the decryption key, so it is the electronic equivalent of locking your bike but leaving the key in the lock)
- charging exorbitant prices for the electronic version (what are the costs for electronic distribution vs paper distribution?)
- holding out on releasing the electronic version (giving people more incentive to go find a pirated copy)
These are all VERY BAD IDEAS.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see next-generation authors bypassing the whole ordeal and selling e-texts directly from their own site, especially if electronic readers gain mass-acceptance. And then where will the publishing houses be?
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