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Originally Posted by TadW
Simply put, publishers are greedy and they don't want to abandon their existing business model. Hence they keep the price of e-books artificially high to make them less attractive, so nobody will buy them, and consequently they will never pick up momentum.
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Yup that about sums it up.
When we, the customer, have to pay $300+ for the reader, we expect to make that up with lower-than-paper prices for eBooks. If they aren't cheaper, it's not worth getting the reader and, therefore, eBooks don't sell.
That's why I believe that eBook readers will take off using public domain content gleaned from places like Blackmask and Project Gutenberg, rather than "new" content (i.e. current titles in the bookstores).
Of course, the Publishers will have the same problem as the RIAA:
+ They won't satisify the market.
+ So the market satisifies itself, unfortunately, with pirated content.
+ The publishers point to all that pirated content and claim that the reason people are buying less books is because of all the pirated content - when the real reason is that they refuse to offer what the customers want.