Ahhh peter...

Nice to see that you bit. Despite all the education you clearly have old boy. I fully understand the points you were making, as well as the ones you were implying too... Hence the joke at my own expense about marks out of ten. Which clearly you missed.

In terms of the point about the single format, totally agree. Sony seem to have realised the same thing and are ditching their proprietary formats to move to the standard the same as the Amazon store. I think it'll take a long time for the readers themselves to catch on and reckon the take up of ebook media(viewable on PC's), will eventually be fuelled more by educational institutions buying digital formats alongside hard copies. Libraries as well quite possibly. Whether that will trickle down to price reductions for consumer purchases though is another matter. Although the prices are coming down already as I stated in my badly made original points. I've seen that in the last month with my own purchases.

Your point about the global situation is valid too, although I'm certain people will soon start finding the means to again buy things they can't afford. But at £200+ for the latest models and the cheaper old models vanishing from stock fast, I suspect the £150 ish limit once felt to be the impulse purchase threshold, but vastly exceeded the last few years, is going to come sharply back into force.

That's my opinion on it. Slightly better put and considered I hope than previously!

Pricing and author payments

Nigel, yes, yes, yes.

The sooner every one on the planet has one the better - and this will require a standard format to obviate many problems - it will save a lot of living wood. The downside is the tendency of publishers to emulate the stupidity and greed of the music industry. I'll except Naxos here.

Pricing and author payments

My neighbour has a book in print at the moment; paperback price £6.99. Ebook price is £1.20 more than that - that's an increase of over 17%.

He does receive an additional royalty for the eBook version - 5% more than the usual royalty he gets on the print version, so he'll get a little more, which is fine - he wrote the book, after all, and deserves to make money from it.

But the bulk of the extra money for the eBook version is going to the publisher - and they no longer have printing, shipping and warehousing costs.

Look at the online catalogue for Penguin and you'll see that the pricing of most of their eBooks is set in line with the pricing of the hardback edition. I can't imagine that doing anything other than harming the business in the long run.

Most people do want the authors to be rewarded, I think. But it seems pretty clear to me that, though authors may benefit a little more from electronic sales, the biggest winner is the publishing company, by a country mile.

It ought to be possible, surely, to sell for the equivalent of the paperback price - or less - and still provide the author and publisher with a better return than for the print edition - unless somehow those involved in creating eBooks and licensing the DRM and fulfilment mechanisms have contrived to make all that more costly than printing and shipping actual physical products.

That perceived greed was at least a factor in the woes of the music industry; it's disheartening to see the major publishers (with some exceptions, like O'reilly) not learning from their mistakes.