I am afraid Mr Jones is, like so many insiders in the world of Big Publishing, totally misguided and wrong.

What planet exactly is Mr Jones living on when he says: "An e-book is worth what people are willing to pay for it, we are told, as if the same logic would ever be applied to other consumer items."

Excuse me but this is exactly how all other consumer items are sold. Price fixing is illegal across most of the Western world. Almost all consumer items are sold at a wholesale price and the retail price is set by the retailer. How can you not be familiar with the standard commercial model ?

Mr Jones talks about tragedies. Yet the real tragedy is that he and his colleagues have some emotional dependency on what the retail price of eBooks are rather than the total revenue earned from them. What that happens to any industry it is in real trouble. It is also in real trouble if it thinks that it's lazy, stagnant, over paid, inefficient business models have to be supported by high prices. It is no wonder most people with any insight are signalling the end of the days of the Big Publishers.

Perhaps Mr Jones et al have lived for too long in the surreal world of Big Publishers where commercial rules and the rights of consumers have been ignored for too long. But now it's changing. The consumer will no longer tolerate this kind of arrogant Price Fixing. The US, UK and EU are bearing down their necks with a chopping knife. The consumer has also discovered that titles that get the approval of Big Publishers have not guaranteed quality in the past, and the new waves of self published titles are delivering the same quality.

Hi Philip.  Interesting article - thanks for posting, I enjoyed reading it.

I think the points you raise are extremely valid - particularly in relation to how eBooks are generally priced from the major publishers.  I read an article recently about the obscure back/cross/subsidised way that books (electronic & printed) are commercially modelled by publishers and retailers - seemed overly complicated to me.

In my opinion what Indie Publishing and lower prices mean for writers is a simpler, easier model to work with; and very often a higher percentage of the cover price of their work.

I agree that there will undoubtedly be work out there, under the Indie eBook model, that is of dubious quality, however the cream always rises to the top - readers themselves can now make the decisions about what is good, or not, through their purchasing decisions.

A lower price does not necessarily mean lower quality; certainly not when this price is set by the writer/author themselves.  I also believe that there will always be a place for a price premium for the professionally published work.

I posted an article on our blog yesterday entitled 'The eBook Revolution'.  Maybe worth a look, maybe not: blog.iwritereadrate.com/?p=246

Saturn - agree with you on this, high pricing, proprietary DRM and sandboxed file formats are not good for writers or readers, and they have the affect of potentially creating more widespread piracy of eBooks than would otherwise be worth doing.

All the best

Adam Charles

iWriteReadRate.com