[EricDP]

They think they will go out of business?

Last year I bought about $400 worth of paper books. First quarter of this year, I bought about $100, so I was on target for the same. Somewhere around April I started researching eBooks and readers. When I discovered that an eBook was the same price as a paper book and there were significant restrictions on how I could use it, I started looking for alternatives that were fair. Then I discovered Projet Gutenberg and realized that for free, I could read all those hundreds of classics I'd never got around to reading because I simply couldn't make myself pay full price for a book knowing that $0 went to the original (long dead) author.

I still haven't bought a reader, but this past weekend I read A Christmas Carol on my Blackberry and I'm now reading Gulliver's Travels. I'm enjoying these books far more than I thought I would.

Back to the point: if the publishers think selling eBooks for a reasonable price will bankrupt them, then they are wrong. They will go bankrupt because there are thousands of free books out there and *that* is what they are competing against now. I won't pay another cent for a book until I can:

a) replace everything in my paper library with electronic versions for reasonable cost (e.g. $1 per book sounds reasonable to me - not pay full price *again* for the same book).
b) get electronic versions of new books for reasonable cost ($4-$5 sounds reasonable to me)
c) get assurances that my electronic books will be readable in ten years, twenty years, or more, and won't become unreadable becuase my current 'registered' device is dead, or the format is obsolete and I'm unable to convert it because of DRM issues

Big publishers: you just lost $400/year of revenue that won't come back until you get reasonable. And I suspect I'm not the only one who's stopped buying books, and I also suspect some people were spending a lot more than me. But if you can make the price reasonable, I will start buying new books again.