I still don't understand why publishers are not giving priority to making ebooks out of their backlists. Authors and their agents should be putting all the pressure they can on getting this done (or getting the ebooks rights back). An ebook is perhaps still a small percentage of new book sales, but I'm sure it is a large and growing percentage of backlist sales (see
Not enough titles available for Kindle?). This is why I am not certain that Amazon is loosing money on ebooks - they don't significantly discount backlists and they sell very well when they are available.