I half wonder if all of the fighting now is the fear on the horizon of obsolescence. If more people start to want to buy ebooks more, companies like Amazon are will to list directly from the Author with more money to the Author, and the ease of advertising now with the Internet that in the future a Publisher could become obsolete. We are not talking tomorrow, but it is a future possibility. This becomes doubly more so as the print on demand technologies become better and cheaper so that individuals wanting print books could still have that fulfilled at still a lower cost than publishers.

That being said, I despise hardbacks. Double to triple the price for the same story, but in a format that is heavy, doesn’t fit in my purse, & doesn’t fit as well on my book shelf. I only indulge for about 4 authors, the ones that I absolutely cannot wait another 6 months to a year for the paperback to come out. It has always been my assumption that the higher price has to do with the added dustjacket, the heavier binding, and the heavier, bigger paper.

I want to go the ereader route, but what I’m waiting for are the following:
– A standardized format that every ereader can display & that every catalog sells. I don’t want to be limited to just Amazon’s catalog, or just Barnes & Noble’s, etc.
– Prices for ebooks need to be consistent with mass market paperbacks. See my notes above. In an ebook, it’s truly the STORY that I should be paying for, not the BOOK. Indeed, I am one of the consumers who’s been told for years that the bulk of the cost of the book is wrapped up in the physical book … the cost of paper, the cost of warehousing inventory, the cost of printing, the cost of distribution. I have a hard time even justifying paying a paperback price for an ebook when the majority of the physical book costs ought to go away.

Resolve those issues, and I will likely go 100% ebook.

The only thing I will really regret is the number of people who will lose their jobs … the warehouse workers, the papermill workers, the printers, & the distributors. I don’t know how to resolve that issue.

Additionally, and as I believe FrancisT was somewhat alluding to, I wonder if maybe the big publishing houses fear a world with substantial eBook sales. In the current system (paper books), it is not a cheap thing to mass market publish a book (what with all the costs associated with printing and delivering a book). But if eBooks became the medium of choice for readers, then any individual would be able to “publish” and sell his/her book just by uploading it to an online eBook seller. Sure, big publishing houses would still have the money to advertise and therefore sell more titles and attract the “big name”, and therefore best selling, authors, but it would level the playing field somewhat. And, as time goes by, as more and more authors who have a “hit” via self-publishing (or through a smaller publisher), the incentive to move to one of the big publishers would be reduced because the difference in the bottom line for the author would be less.

Large companies, while often intractable, have self-preservation on their mind just as much as profits. The big publishers could start a massive push towards eBooks tomorrow if they wanted to, but clearly they don’t. If it was as simple as some say it could be, the big publishers could cut their expenses considerably, lower prices, increase sales and make more profit overnight. So why aren’t they? There must be an element of fear and not just the normal fear of change.

What it does do is allow you to download only the songs you like off an album, which makes it cheaper to get that one song instead of buying a whole album to get it.

And while ebooks wouldn’t work on the ITune model (who’s going to pay for a book by downloading individual chapters? And which ones could they leave out because they didn’t like them?), I think your overall point still stands: ITunes forced the music industry into a new business model kicking and screaming, and it appears the same thing will be happening to publishers.

But I’m not sure that if one bought an album’s songs from ITunes, that it would be much cheaper, if at all, than hopping down to the store and buying the CD. Plus, most of us are going to burn those songs onto a CD so we can listen to them in the car or other old fashion playing device, so we have added expense of buying a blank CD at a store and the time spent burning it.

So I’m not sure if we’re talking comparing the cost of getting an album from ITunes to buying a CD at a store that it actually shows a similar situation to what we want to see happen with ebooks, which is, you have far lower cost to make them, store them, deliver them, and sell them: they should be default be cheaper than a paperback book.