[HarryT]

We disagree, John, because we're talking about two different things. You're saying that bestsellers are often cheaper as paper books than as ebooks. Fair enough - I don't disagree with that. I'm saying that the vast majority of book titles - i.e. range of titles, not individual books sold - are cheaper as ebooks than as paper books. A person who buys one book a year is probably going to buy a bestseller from a supermarket for their summer holiday. A person who buys 10+ books a month (as many MR members do) is going to buy very few bestsellers, and for that buyer most of their ebooks will be cheaper than if they'd bought the paper books.

Are most books sold to the 1-book-a-year brigade? Very probably, yes. I doubt that one person in a thousand buys the 100+ books a year that's entirely normal for MR members. We're the outliers, by any measure. But for us outliers, ebooks are cheaper than paper books, due both to the fact that most titles have cheaper ebooks than paper books, and because we pick up the freebies, deals and special offers that the supermarket buyers never see, and those can push the average price paid per book way down.