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Originally Posted by Ivo
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I am more inclined to believe that the publishers do not want the ebook business to succeed, at least not yet.
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There are some that don't -- at BookExpo America some executives even admitted to "hating" ebooks.
But by and large we'd love to be selling more ebooks (which, at the moment, only account for 3-4% of publishers' sales). We'd rather not be so dependent on printers -- they're one more party we owe money to; we'd love to eliminate the extra 4 to 5 weeks we have to build into our publishing schedules to allow for printing time; we'd love to not have to worry about how quickly our distributors can ship books to every store in the country; we'd rather not be so dependent on independent distributors. But there are tangible benefits to physical books, of course.
Personally, I'm in the camp that wants all our books to be in ebook format on the same date that physical books are available, and I want them to be as inexpensive as possible. But the numbers don't add up at the moment, and if we were suddenly to have to abandon physical books entirely and do nothing but ebooks using the terms Kindle would like for us all to agree to, we wouldn't be in business for very long ... unless ebook sales absolutely skyrocket, and at the moment, there simply aren't enough ebook readers out there to allow ebook sales to skyrocket to the needed levels.
But to make a long story short (if it's not too late for that) those of us under 50 who are in management positions are doing all we can to make epublishing a major part of what we do and to meet the expectations of people who read ebooks. As I'm sure you know, people who read ebooks read a LOT of ebooks. Even I -- a person who reads a lot of books -- have found that, since getting an ereader, I'm reading far, far more than ever before.
The publishers who "hate" ebooks tend to be the older set.