For all other books, I just won’t pay that much. I’ll wait for the paperback edition. What I will do, however, and have done, is buy a digital version ($9.99) to read it right away and then ALSO buy the paperback when it comes out (if I liked/loved the book) so my analog collection is complete.

For me, a digital copy available at first release = 2 sales.

Question: before e-books, would you have purchased the hard cover edition or waited for the paperback?

fair comment. I guess I was generalising to prove a point. I know a lot of STM and Academic publishers in the UK that have embraced e-books.

I personally think piracy is generally as a result of what the market wants not being available. There’s a lot of evidence to support that.

I think e-books should be the perfect media for any texts with with footnotes, endnotes bibliographies and appendices. If e-books aren’t using that functionality or delivering it well then that’s another story.

I work at an academic press and I can tell you that most academic presses have NOT embraced ebooks. And here are a couple of reasons why:

Academic books make up the largest segment of pirated ebook material. There are at least 30 sites that I know of that actively post illegal copies of STM and humanities titles for students. This leads to lost sales for publishers, and also contributes to palgiarism, which is a huge and growing problem.

Our authors, who are all scholars, need their work in print to qualify for tenure and promotion at their universities. E-books just do not have the street cred yet. If you think publishers are slow to change, try talking to an academic advisory board!

And scholarly books aren’t “read” in the same way as trade books. Footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, and appendices just do not function properly on e-readers.

And, just to head off any criticism about textbook pricing, I’m not talking about textbooks here. I’m talking about scholarly monographs, which at our press, we price as low as we can to ease the burden on students (in the $25-$29 range.)

Publishing is an unmbrella word that covers so many different niches, genres and activities that the idea there is just one answer seems uninformed.

Yes, of course ebooks are going to grow in importance. In some fields – science fiction is one and erotica may be another – it appears to be very successful both as digital offerings and as ebooks driving print sales.

On the other hand, if you research US and UK sales, the rise of the print book from new technology such as POD is phenomenal; up some 600 percent in titles since 2002.

The percentage of book sales verifiably ebook is miniscule at present. And some small publisher sales are not included in print industry income figures.

When this is compared with the music industry the differences are rearely appreciated. While book buyers have only been exposed to the digital file for a decade, the music listener has been using them in many ways such as the Walkman [remember that?].

But the music industry too is not a monolith. Pop music is almost completely different to classical, orchestral and shows.

Even in discussing the decline in pop sales one possibility is never discussed. That pop music just isn’t as popular as it was – especially as the recession begins to bite.

And the internet, which has probably done more for print books sales than for ebooks, is hardly out of nappies in terms of experience and maturity.

At a guess the whole digital file market in a couple of decades will be somewhere under 50% of the whole and print books will have held fairly steady as reading in toto grows.

The social changes that are likely from the technological revolution have not really even started yet, and may not go in the expected directions anyway.

A very interesting time, as the Chinese say.

Delaying Ebook Releases: A Publisher Weighs In