[neilmarr]

Not all publishers are greedy. Sometimes (especially with smaller houses) there's little control over the cover price of ebooks when outside retail is involved. Some fair retailers, of course, invite the publisher to set price, and they stick to that, though their affiliates may not and might disregard the publisher's RRP.

For instance, my own publishing house's homesite store has pegged our non-DRM ebooks at a flat two bucks or equivalent for the past five years (that's OK because our paperbacks can cover in-house costs so far -- and we saw ebooks mainly as a promotional tool until fairly recently ... almost a by-product of the main job).

Outside retailers, however, can pretty well price them as they see fit. Many do the same with paperback, incidentally. I've seen our titles offered at frighteningly inflated prices as well as at frighteningly high discount. And sometimes, it's the retailer who insists on DRM and not the publisher ... I would certainly never invite such penalisation of my honest reader.

We've now got so many retail outlets around the world that we must upwardly adjust our ebook price soon to $7.00 so as not to present unfair competition with our own sellers. I'm even wondering whether to shut our own store and leave the sales side of things entirely to outside retail, concentrating on the job at hand, which is to enable our authors, produce the best possible result from their work, and excite the reader.

The market's a bloody shambles right now.

When things level out and the bigger publishers can see how heavily treebook sales are likely to be hit by ebooks, they'll -- hopefully -- be able to more fairly share the cost of presentation of their work between the paper and electronic platforms.

There's a whole chain of folks involved in publishing and how it will change. Some of the more expensive elements will go by the board; print, physical distribution, warehousing, high street retail ... and, of course, the tremendously wasteful sale or return (sale or destroy) principle.

When ebooks take the driving seat, I hope we will see publishers spend their pennies on better editorial work, fair promotion and inceased royalties, delivering the product direct from publisher desk to reader, and that cutting out the expensive and non-creative middle men will produce a fair price for the words you want to read.

You may say that I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one.

Cheers. Neil