Book Printing.

E-book readers, and the e-books to read upon them, are a relatively new innovation. Nevertheless, the public seems to have accepted them very quickly. A good deal of the credit for that must surely go to the Amazon Kindle reader – in particular the Kindle 2.0 which was launched in February of 2009. Amazon's upgraded third generation Kindle was unveiled in August of 2010 and, despite doom laden predictions for the Kindle following the launch of Apple's iPad, is selling more quickly than ever. However, it was the Kindle 2.0 that really raised the public profile of e-books.

Another important factor was the large selection of Kindle books on offer. Amazon has always been ahead of the chasing pack in terms of the number of titles on offer. Today they have over 750,000 Kindle books available on their Kindle store – and that’s just the paid titles. They have a further 1.8 million titles which are out of copyright and are now available for download free of charge.

However, whilst the public may have adapted to e-books very quickly, it remains to be seen if the main publishing companies have got their corporate heads around the concept yet. The introduction of e-books has totally changed the traditional publishing cycle. It's not just that e-books are cheaper than printed books (since they consume no paper, ink or bindings) - there's no reason why they shouldn't be on sale simultaneously with the hardback edition. The e-book version is available immediately - no need to wait months for the paperback to be released.

Obviously, having a cheaper version available at the same time as the hardback is something which could impact upon the sales of hardback books. According to Amazon, they are currently selling 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardbacks. This seems to have given many of the big publishers cause for concern. They have previously had some terse discussions with Amazon on the subject of e-book pricing.

Publishers like Harper Collins, Penguin and Hachette recently moved to the “agency model” for their e-books. In layman's terms, the price is set by the publisher as opposed to the retailer (Amazon). This has seen e-book prices rise – in some cases to the point where they cost more than the hardback version.

Kindle owners quickly made their feelings known by awarding “one star” reviews to titles where they felt that the price of the Kindle version had been set too high. Some fairly critical comments were left on the Amazon website – aimed at the publishers by and large – and it was suggested that potential customers boycott both the Kindle and the hardback versions until prices are set at more reasonable levels. Some prices have already come down.

Adopting such a profit oriented approach seems to be a little short sighted on the part of the publishers. It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that e-book reader owners read a lot of books. If you only read a book a month then you would hardly invest in an e-book reader would you? In other words, e-book reader owners are the target market for the major publishing houses.

It seems obvious - just even - that e-books should cost less than traditional books. In addition to the lack of paper, ink and bindings, they have virtually no delivery fees associated with them. They are also more environmentally friendly – even when the materials used in the e-book readers themselves are taken into account. It seems likely that e-book reader users would be able to work this out and that they would naturally expect prices to be correspondingly lower.

It could be that the publisher's tactics will prove successful in the short term - however, they need to take care not to antagonise some of their best customers. Artificial price hikes are likely to alienate the buying public and, after a series of one star reviews and public calls for buying boycotts, authors would probably also be somewhat unhappy. Publishers stand to gain just as much from the e-book revolution as the public. The savings apply on both sides of the fence, publishers save money – which should be passed on to the public. Publishers who adopt e-books, in just the same way that the reading public has, will be successful going forward. On the other hand, if their desire for short term profits inures them to the possible opportunities offered by this new medium, they will be rejected by both their authors and their readers.