The problems in publishing are myriad and window vs. no window really makes little difference. The flaw is that ebooks are being equated with hardcover book sales when the y should be equated with paperback sales. I believe that there is a cadre of hardcover bookbuyers who will continue to buy hardcover books regardless of when an ebook (or, for that matter a paperback) is released. I am one of those people (although I rarely buy fiction hardcover; almost all my purchases are nonfiction).

The results of my (granted, unscientific) survey of readers and bookbuyers is that if the ebook is a threat to anything in publishing, it is a threat to paperback sales. People who buy paperbacks rarely buy hardcover books; people who buy ebooks used to buy largely paperbacks. Using myself as an example, it doesn’t matter whether Stephen King or James Patterson’s newest book is released iall all formats simultaneously or spread out over 25 years — I am not a buyer of their work. OTOH, I do buy the books of L.E. Modesitt and David Weber, but I buy their books in hardcover when released; again it makes no difference to me when or if an ebook or paperback is released.

But ebooks, the subject of the conversation, do supplant paperback buys in my universe. For example, yesterday I bought 17 ebooks — all from authors I have never read, all fiction, and all inexpensive (average price $2.75) and DRM-free. (FWIW, it was this kind of ebook buy that introduced me to David Weber’s writing and converted me from ebook to hardcover buyer, not the other way round.) These are books that I would never have bought in paperback or, especially, hardcover. But it may turn out that one or more of the authors really captures me and will turn me into a hardcover buyer of their books (or a buyer of higher priced ebooks).

I’ve been long-winded but my point boils down to this: Those who want to read Stephen King in hardcover will buy hardcover at release; those who won’t buy hardcover will wait 1 year for the paperback release. Those who buy only ebooks will either wait or move on. The publishers are confusing their audiences and the bookbuying habits of those audiences. Again, if ebooks are a threat to anything, they are a threat to paperbacks, not hardcovers.

This year, Publishers Lunch offered up a dissection of unit sales for NBA nominees (http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/lunch/archives/005937.php), and again, the numbers are painfully low. I continue to wonder if the greater profit margins are really so great when units simply don’t move. Even if the publisher is making money, surely all those unrecouped advances add up? Then there’s the problem of getting enough readers to take a chance on an author (or getting those readers to follow an author to hardcover after a mass market or trade career), especially given the price of the book. Over and over, it’s made clear that women are the primary purchasers of fiction (even more so if the author is female, which is just puzzling to me), and the one thing we know about many of these women is books are a luxury. A luxury that sometimes falls below shoes and other items for children.

I know the reason women have adopted ebooks is the convenience factor, and I strongly suspect the reason they’ve adopted the $9.99 price point is because it seems affordable. $27.99, especially if you’re a fast or heavy reader, is unmanageable. I’m feeling like, yes, there’s good money in hardcovers, but the possible audience is necessarily limited by the price point. At the very least, ebooks give the reader an opportunity to buy into that market, at relatively good returns for the publisher (even when, as I believe is inevitable, the pricing structure moves to net).

Long way of saying: way too many books are published as hardcover when the overall returns don’t justify it, and considering the readers might actually increase sales!

And, as you pointed out in your link to my blog post on trade numbers (thank you!) a trade book’s P&L is not for the faint-hearted.