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I think the idea that the big 5 are trying to keep prices high so people will buy more paper books is an oversimplification. I suspect there's much more to it than that and that it's much more about simply keeping book prices high.
My guess is that publishers are afraid Amazon's discounting will eventually bring the normal price for new books down and they'll eventually find themselves getting their share of $10 books instead of $15 books.
I doubt they really care whether people buy ebooks or paper books as long as they pay high prices.
Actually that's probably an oversimplification as well. They probably would prefer people buy paper books because most of those have a limited lifetime and ebooks stay available forever and keep going down in price, competing with higher priced paper book.
But I think their real concern isn't ebooks vs paper, it's high prices vs low prices.
I think the publishers are playing a losing game but I'm not sure there's a winning game available to them. The sky is falling and they're reacting.
Of course no-one knows how this will all play out but I suspect that in a few years book prices will be lower and large publishers will be making less money per book. It's sure in their best interest to try to put that off as long as possible.
Barry
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