Baen Webscriptions : Several hundred dollars spent over past 3 years.

All other ebooks : ZERO.

I have found I like reading books on computer, it is easier on my old eyes. I still buy a few hardcover and a few paperbacks each year to read while traveling. I have not yet purchased an ebook reader, as I have about decided a netbook is a better value for me. The only issue will be availability of ebooks for the netbook, and I suspect I will be able to find compatible formats for a long time to come.

And yes, they DO say to publishers “here’s what you get, deal with it”. Since many publishers are now dependent on Amazon for more than 50% of their annual sales revenue, what can they say in return? Anyone who says otherwise hasn’t dealt with A on a large scale. They are willing to make threats until they get what they want.

Honest competitors in the ebook retailing space cannot compete on discounts alone in the long term. Alternative strategies do exist and will be tried, but it won’t be easy. Still, it is a big, wide market full of interesting niches for the fleet of foot, and most believe open standards will prevail in the long run.

You ask that people look ahead and try to stop Amazon, but you don’t give a good reason why they need to be stopped.

I’d hate to be an Amazon shareholder.

As I understand it, the pbook distribution system is one which allows publishers to ship more books to retailers than the retailers are able to sell. But the retailers pay in advance for those books. This generates a cash flow to publishers which allows them to operate, at an effective interest rate of zero

The problem is, this model doesn’t work for ebooks. Ebooks are sold one at a time, not in advance distribution of lots. The result is that the financing isn’t there, so selling ebooks would presumably require publishers to borrow money at the prevailing interest rate.

So the primary barrier to ebooks has nothing much to do with the relative costs of printing pbooks. In effect, it may well be that pbooks are *cheaper* to print than ebooks, notwithstanding the fact that the consumer gets a more substantial and longlasting product if he buys a pbook.

I know that this is counterintuitive. But I think it explains the inability of publishers and retailers to adjust to the ebook market.

The problem is that, in the end, it doesn’t matter! People will pay if they feel the product is worth it, and, right now, that often isn’t the case for big titles. If publishers want customers to pay more, they need to convince us why.

Unfortunately, most publishers don’t view eBooks as a supplemental sales channel to hardcover books. They believe lower-priced eBooks will cannibalize their high-margin hardcover releases

@Richard Askenase: I don’t think you are going to win over anyone’s hearts with the argument that publishers should downsize their operations so that customers can pay less for books. Your argument implies that profits will be lower with eBooks, and I don’t believe that to be the case at all.

@Chris: I understand that is what you are getting at in the article. That’s why I said the comments were re-treading ground.

One must break down the cost of a book in the following way:
1) Advances to authors (of which agents also get a cut and therefore are motivated to get as large an advance as possible) and subsequent royalties
2) Editors. While many people who advocate that authors are who matter and editors do not actually edit, readers might not feel the same if they have to wade through manuscripts to shape a book as well as cleaning up spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes.
3) Publicity. In this age, a book will not hit big without having publicity and marketing people ensuring that a book receives some notice, be it in print, on the internet, radio, or tv interviews. All this requires people dedicated to the sole purpose of pushing a book.
4) Production. Whether a book is online or in print, the book has to be typeset to make it easy to read. Again, all one has to do is compare reading 600 pages of reading manuscript pages in regular word documents as opposed to a finished typeset book. The finished typeset book, if set well by a good interior designer, should be less strain on the eye.
5) Support staff. These include assistant editors, financial people, rights departments, permissions department, those who handle contracts.
6) Overhead. This includes physical buildings such as offices and warehouses. If/when ebooks completely take over, warehouses might not be needed. But until then, publishing houses must find a way to maintain a warehouse with all the staff that a warehouse needs (and it’s quite a large staff). And even if warehouses will no longer be needed in the future, if ebooks become the only way of buying a book, then a publishing house will have to hire a team of data architects to keep up all the ebooks.

I do NOT accept the proposition that these costs are diminimus. Each book is warehoused at least twice (publisher and distributor), often a third time(distributor for a retailer), and shipped at least twice (publisher to distributor then to retailer).

There is NONE of that cost with an ebook. There is a small cost to convert it (software), and to proof it (human cost), and a small cost to store it on a server. Then it’s done. No further costs. So, an ebook costs MUCH less than any printed book. Any other position is, as Spock would say, “illogical.”

There is also no cost to Amazon, other than maintaining large servers, certainly MUCH less cost than warehousing and shipping an item.

So, what we have here is a tug of war between Amazon and publishers (nothing new there) but regarding a different subject- ebooks and their pricing. I think that the consumer resistance (boycott) to pricing over $9.99 is both well founded (and logical) and effective. Prices on Amazon for Kindle editions are dropping to that level, and Amazon appears to be selling plenty of Kindle books. That means that the publishers ARE GETTING MONEY FROM THEIR EBOOKS. Hello!! Isn’t that what they want?

But the publishers are ridiculous in their ebook listing price (matching them to pbooks). So, I do expect Amazon to start putting pressure on publishers to lower their prices on Kindle ebooks. And that is logical since the publishers prices are too high, as I said.

So where is this going? In time, I expect the publishers to lower their ebook prices, that Amazon will lower its prices a lttle (maybe the benchmark price will be a little lower than $9.99), other e-tailers will match that price, publishers will downsize (they do NOT need the expensive Manhattan locations, for example), and they will sell a greater portion of their books as ebooks.

And all of that appears to me to be the right direction. And, guess what, everybody profits!

It reminds me of the Britannicca salesmen story that led to the creation of Encarta…

I think they’re being incredibly greedy and fearful (drm and other attempts to restrict use) and are losing themselves a lot of potential customers. Then I wonder why ANYONE is paying stupidly high prices for drm ebooks. C’mon people, stop paying them to do this and maybe they’ll get a clue.