[HarryT]

Originally Posted by darryl

I suspect that you are far from alone. What I find so frustrating is the failure of Big Publishing to acknowledge, even implicitly, the reality of the current EBook world. They are completely at the mercy of readers, who, for whatever reason, continue to purchase their product, despite the fact that they can easily and trivially obtain a pirate copy.

Which suggests, does it not, that people are generally happy with "the system" as it stands? I know that you consider that customers are being "gouged", but I certainly don't. I'm paying an awful lot less for books now than I was 10 years ago. 10 years ago I bought all my books from bookshops where they were sold at full price, which was generally £6.99 or £7.99 (US$11-13) for a paperback; today it's rare that I pay £5 for an ebook - most of the books I buy cost £3-4.

Are there $20 ebooks around? Yes, certainly there are. But, at least in the area of fiction, they are almost all newly-published books that are only out in hardback, and the ebook price falls dramatically once the paperback is released. There's nothing wrong with charging a high price for a new product: there are people who are willing to pay more to read a book NOW rather than in a year's time, and it's a legitimate business strategy to make money from such people. In exactly the same way, I know that if I wait a year, a DVD of a newly-released film which costs £15 today will probably be available for £5.

[Publishers...] despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (the fact that they are still in business) seem to cling to the paranoid belief that readers are dishonest and not to be trusted.

Sorry, darryl, but you seem to be contradicting yourself here. In post #30 in this thread you said:

The mechanism that takes care of the differences in disposable income in poorer countries now is piracy, not publishing.

which suggests that you believe that large-scale piracy is happening. Publishers would seem, therefore, to be far from "paranoid" if they believe that "readers are dishonest and not to be trusted".

And, of course, they attempt to artificially recreate geographic barriers which do not exist on the internet so as to cling to their outdated but profitable business models.

As has already been stated several times in this thread, regional distribution contracts are primarily down to the choices made by authors, not publishers. If an author sells ebook rights to the UK only to a publisher, then that publisher would be breaking their contact if they offered the book to customers outside the UK. You're blaming the publisher for something that they have no control over.