[Direct Ebooks]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

I really don't comprehend their thinking here.

Let's say, pulling numbers out of thin air, that they can sell a physical book for $10 retail, and get a net $2 profit from it, or sell an ebook for $6 retail and get a net $3 profit from it. Instead, they sell the ebook for $12, so to protect their sales of a format they're getting a lesser profit from. That's like refusing to sell hardcovers for fear they'll cut into paperback sales.

To be fair, the pricing structures are very complex for paper/hard backs although I do take your main point. Re Hardbacks v paperbacks, thats actually exactly what publishers do - the paperback isn't released until they have sold their quota of Hardbacks. That is why changing teh thinking on eBooks is so hard for publishers. Many view it as a threat.

The publishers doing this are harming themselves in several ways:

The buyer who didn't buy the ebook isn't going to buy the HC instead; they're going to buy a different ebook from a competing publisher. So it's not just a lost ebook sale, it's a lost sale, and possibly a lost customer.

Agreed. Customers want instant gratification and will move elsewhere.

There will be people who are sufficiently peeved by what they see as price gouging or corporate greed to distribute illicit copies of the book. Perhaps more important to the publisher, there are people who would have been legitimate buyers if the ebook had been reasonably priced, but now cross that ethical line and just go download the thing. After they've done it once, why not do it again? Their superposed ethical quantum states collapse, and what comes out is piracy.

I agree that this does happen, but its not a legitimate excuse to pirate.(I always think of the loss to the creator - the author in this argument) I think publishers will come to recognise this and realise that you cant stop the piracy but you can make a product good enough to discourage these practices. Many publishers are experimenting with ways to make their products worth their customers money. (enhanced editions, better formatting, vooks etc)

Goodwill is an important thing to a business. Companies go to great and expensive lengths to create it. It's obvious to everyone that a physical book, needing paper, ink, printing, packaging, warehousing, shipping, returns, and all of that, has to cost significantly more than a digital file. Even if they've never thought about this in terms of books, they feel it intuitively. They know the pictures they take with their digital cameras don't cost anything when they look at them on the computer screen or email to all of their relatives, only when they print them out. So when they see a format that costs the publisher essentially nothing to reproduce as many copies as necessary being sold for more than the price of a format that needs to be physically manufactured, they feel ripped off. This costs the publisher goodwill.

Agreed. I know its getting a bit old, but this will happen! Its just going to take longer than any of us want. Is there a role for publishers in a digital-only or digital majority future?

Why are ebook sales only 5% of the market? Aside from poor quality, high prices, and DRM, I'd have to guess that a major reason is not enough people with the means to read them. People look at not just the price of the reader but the price of the books, and figure it's a better idea just to buy paper books, since they're getting more utility. Back in the mainframe days, a computer program cost more than a nice car; nowadays, when practically everyone owns at least one computer, economies of scale have dropped the prices to affordable, sometimes even trivial, levels.

Thats certainly part of the issue - having said that almost half of eBook readers read on a computer or laptop. Also, I thin teh confusion over formats, devices and drm confuse a lot of people. Much of our day-to-day customer service revolves around guiding customers through Adobe Digital Editions!
Again, as the industry settles down, eBooks will become more mainstream and popular. I think that will happen faster than we think when the time comes.

I remember games for the Apple II selling for $50 back around 1980-ish; that would be $132.06 today, according to the inflation calculator. Now you can get a new-release game for less than half of that, even a third of that, in constant dollars. And games haven't gotten any cheaper to make; on the contrary, a lot of those Apple games were written by two guys in six months, not two hundred guys in a couple of years. But the market has increased from a few thousand to many millions.

Volume will certainly help change publisher's opinions and plans. When they see that it begins seriously impacting their bottom line, thats when many will act. unfortunately, it may be too late for some of them.

Let's say someone buys an ebook reader for $300, and buys a book every month. Amortized over a period of five years, that ebook reader is costing them $5 a month -- that is, adding $5 to the price of the ebook. So even if the ebook was the same price as the pbook, that $5 has to be factored into it, too. For ordinary buyers (as opposed to us bookaholics) to decide that an ebook reader is worth buying, that equation has to change.

Thats an interesting way of looking at it. I think we will see more and more multi-use devices (ipad etc) that will negate that particular argument. Many early adopters are voracious readers - we have many customers who read 8-12 titles a week (wish I had the time!) so the initial outlay is not a huge factor with them I'm guessing.

Ebooks are the ultimate mass market, and publishers are cutting their own throats if they don't recognize this. The ones who figure out first are gonna eat their lunch.

I would agree. Those publishers who embrace or at least try to engage with eBooks and eBook readers will prosper in the short and long term.