Well, I almost never buy hard cover because of the price. They may not make as much from ebooks as hardcovers per sale, but they make more on them per sale than paper backs. It seems to me that if they get their act together that the volume of ebooks would make up for their reduced profit per book. Also, if they are tracking hard back sales and ebook saled over the last couple of years, unless they have been polling people buying ebooks to find out if they would have bought the hard back edition if they were not buying the ebook edition, you could easily have 2 separate groups of people you are talking about even though one group is having significant growth at the same time that the other group is having significant decline. The scenario follows:
groupe one (hard cover buyers): Hard cover books are expensive and with the economy going down the cost cannot be justified (This is actually likely since the economy has been getting worse during the same time ebook readers have been getting popular). This group generally buys hard cover books because they like to have the physical book or have to have the book when it first comes out (presumably, this second group would be the group the publishers are referring to and are attempting to target). I could be wrong, but I believe that the larger part of this segment is the group that wants to have the hardback book in their collection. In any event, if convenience and/or price was the major factor in their decision, they would wait for the paper back book.
group 2 (have to have the latest gadget, want more convenient reading): This group includes techno geeks (I include myself in this category) and people that do not want to lug around the hard bound book because it is inconvenient (I think allot of us fall into both of these categories and pretty much all of us fall into the second category).In either case it is not likely that we would buy the hard bound book.
I suppose there is a 3rd category, those that want the hard cover for their collection and the ebook for convenience. Of course this segment is not a factor unless they are not buying the hard cover because of the economy.
That is my opinion of what is likely. Of course, I do not have any hard data to back this up, just anecdotal evidence from these forums
