Provocative article. But I don't think the fact that book publishers price ebooks and paper books the same is about protecting printing plants. It's actually about protecting a distribution advantage, which is a core part of the publishing business.
The Amazon kindle is a grab at the book distribution business. Amazon's goal seems to be making the Kindle like iTunes+iPod for books. With iTunes, music publishers are becoming increasingly dependent on a single store for a major chunk of their sales. It's plausible that one day soon, iTunes will have serious leverage in promoting songs and shaping the tastes of music consumers. Needless to say, this would be extremely painful for the studios.
Similarly, if Amazon can help you find the books you want, and sell them to you, and deliver them to you, what value do publishers add at all? Publishers deliver value by selecting, developing, and promoting books. If the captive Kindle audience gets big enough, what is left to publishers? Copy edit a book and wholesale it to Amazon? That may be a business but it's not publishing as we know it today; the margins are vastly smaller.
Owning the distribution channel would be tremendously lucrative, which is why Amazon is happy taking a loss on each Kindle book they sell. The publishers are justified in fearing it, but they'd be better served by developing a Kindle alternative that makes both them and their end users happy than sitting on their hands and pretending nothing's changing.
Not to mention, there are a lot of people who don't care about the medium, but rather the price (e.g., college students). I know if an e-book was priced $8 versus the $10 paper version, I'd go with the $8 for pretty much any book. It wouldn't make sense to NOT have an ebook option, but it also wouldn't make sense financially to price it below the paper version. Finally, although I can see reasons for pricing it above the paper version (you have features like search, copy and paste, etc.), I think many people would find this absurd. Hence, the only remaining option is to price them at the same cost as the paper version. Clearly, any of the other options are possible, but the reasons listed here are, I think, valid for not doing so.
The Amazon kindle is a grab at the book distribution business. Amazon's goal seems to be making the Kindle like iTunes+iPod for books. With iTunes, music publishers are becoming increasingly dependent on a single store for a major chunk of their sales. It's plausible that one day soon, iTunes will have serious leverage in promoting songs and shaping the tastes of music consumers. Needless to say, this would be extremely painful for the studios.
Similarly, if Amazon can help you find the books you want, and sell them to you, and deliver them to you, what value do publishers add at all? Publishers deliver value by selecting, developing, and promoting books. If the captive Kindle audience gets big enough, what is left to publishers? Copy edit a book and wholesale it to Amazon? That may be a business but it's not publishing as we know it today; the margins are vastly smaller.
Owning the distribution channel would be tremendously lucrative, which is why Amazon is happy taking a loss on each Kindle book they sell. The publishers are justified in fearing it, but they'd be better served by developing a Kindle alternative that makes both them and their end users happy than sitting on their hands and pretending nothing's changing.