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Typical corporate BS. They're just mad that they somehow convinced people to pay more ($25 and up) for eBooks on other sites, but Amazon is selling them cheaper (which is one of the things Amazon tries to do as a rule - provide goods cheaper than the competition).
It is BS like this that pushes honest people into supporting piracy.
When they lie to your face and tell you ridiculous things like: "We can't make money when Amazon sells ebooks for $9.99!" Everyone knows they are full of crap! They sell paperbacks for $6.99 and $7.99. I know they're not losing money on them, or they wouldn't be doing it!
I don't care what their PR people say. You cannot convince me that the costs of publishing and distributing an ebook are anywhere near the cost of printing & distributing a physical book. I'm an IT professional. I know how much servers and bandwidth cost. I know how much techie staff to keep the servers and bandwidth working costs. I can tell you for certain that it costs a lot less to run a datacenter than it costs to run a physical distribution center and a printing mill.
I used to work in the printing industry. I saw what it takes to print a large quantity of materials. It's a LOT of money and equipment. The cost of ONE of those printing presses is more than 1/2 of what my whole datacenter cost - and our datacenter supports over 100 physical locations and over 50,000 users - with a tech staff of nine people. How many people does it take to run a print shop? A lot more than nine.
These publishers are crying wolf. I say call them on it. They have a choice: get on board with the new technology or get left behind. They're doing a pretty good job of showing they want to be left behind. How long will it take for an upstart techie-based publisher to take over their business?
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