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Publisher profits on all forms of books sold are surprisingly small, Jason. Retailers are to blame here. They take the biggest slice of the pie and want the biggest pie possible. Quite honestly, there's hardly a publisher in the world (apart from repeat-order school/colege textbook merchants) who would not benefit by going entirely ebook. For instance, before Amazon became also a hardware manufacturer, printer and publisher, they sold my own wee company's ebooks ... but at their price! They slapped on a cover price of about two-thirds of paperback when we wanted them to go at ten percent. The hard in-house work of producing a book is covered by treebook sales and there's little expense involved in the production and dstribution of ebook versions. It will be some time yet before publishers need to load ebook prices to cover treebook losses. Don't blame publishers; blame grubby-fingered retailers. There is no excuse for charging $35 for the ebook copy of a book that sells for one third of that in hardback (HARDBACK -- not paperback) unless you're a retailer looking to protect his shelves. N
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