So if I don’t feel like carting around a book collection, I’ll just put up with the eye strain, and stick to taking my laptop on holiday. Or maybe my iPad…

How many books did I get from my friends or parents as a kid that I could not have afforded on my own, or that my parents could not have afforded to purchase for me? All of them. And I read a lot. I still do, when I have time. But as much as I enjoy ebooks, it has to be a rare treat. I just can’t spend $100 a month on books, and I could easily read 10 full length ebooks a month.

The part about not being able to share combined with the price point, and the fact that apple and amazon are paying for the distribution tell me that publishers are being disingenuous about their ebook cost. They simply are afraid of them cutting into print sales.

With distribution and printing costs at zero, how do you figure? Ebooks are overpriced. There’s no way I’d buy an ebook when at $9.99 it’s usually more expensive than a paperback, and at $15 about as expensive as a hardback. Real books are just better, easier on the eyes when reading, don’t need an expensive gadget, provide some satisfaction just looking at them on my shelves, and can be resold to recoup some of their cost. For these reasons I’m not buying ebooks until they’re significantly less expensive than paperbacks, and I suspect the majority of the book buying public agrees.

With eBooks with get DRM, can’t share the book, can’t sell the book after we are done and they save money in publishing costs.

I have bought a lot o books in the Kindle format because the price makes the trade-off worth it. But at a $15 dollar price point it makes it hardly worth buying since that is the price-point Amazon sells a lot of hardcovers.

Consumers have to pony up and actually pay for intellectual property in amounts that make it possible for book publishers to keep publishing and writers to keep writing?

You bet they do.

The notion that the book writing and publishing business can continue to survive at a $9.99 price point is simply dead wrong.

LOL. What do you think Apple is going to do? They’re going to let publishers screw consumers now, and then once the iPad becomes dominant they’re going to drive the prices way lower, screwing publishers and authors, but selling tons of hardware. And if iTunes ultimately dominates books like it does music, how is that good for your “keep competition alive” argument?

That’s very foolish. Amazon’s looking after Amazon’s interests and not those of consumers. A loss by Amazon isn’t a loss for consumers.

Read Amazon’s new royalty agreement for Kindle ebooks and that couldn’t be clearer. To sign up for it, authors and publishers must agree not to:

1. Sell an ebook elsewhere for less than the price on Amazon, even on their own websites where there’s no Amazon taking 30% off the top. That prevents real competition.

2. Sell printed versions of that ebook for less than a price well above the ebook price that Amazon has set. That drives prices up.

Given those rules, Amazon obviously doesn’t want to drive prices down. They’re playing the classic game of nineteenth-century robber barons, selling below cost (here $9.95) to destroy competitors. Once their competition is gone, they’ll dictate prices. They’ll squeeze publishers and authors so badly, the entire book industry will suffer. That’s precisely what Macmillan’s CEO was talking about. Among other things, if Amazon gets its way, publishers will be forced to stick with well-established authors rather than risk money they don’t have (and Amazon won’t let them make) on publishing and promoting new authors.

The result will be bad for “consumers” and even the use of that word instead of “readers” is revealing. Reading will become dismal, dull and predictable. Books are not boxes of corn flakes, something to be produced as identically, quickly and cheaply as possible. The robber barons in their obsession with efficiency never understood that. They could think in no other terms that “cost per unit of production.” Apparently, neither does Amazon.

There’s no need to fear Macmillan. If they overprice their books, we can buy from numerous competitors who will price their books a bit more cheaply. But if there is reason to fear an Amazon if it gets a stranglehold on ebook distribution and pricing. There are many publishers from giant to small to keep competition alive. There’s only one Amazon.

That’s why Apple is so important. They’re about the only company who can compete with Amazon on a level playing field. And with the iPad, they’ve got a product that’s miles ahead of the Kindle.

We live in interesting times…..