About Those Publishers e-Book Prices…

First reported a few days ago, the pundits are now adding their 2 cents.

This from Dan Gillmor at Salon: When America’s book publishers wrested control of e-book prices from Amazon earlier this year, I expected two results. First, prices would go up. Second, I’d buy fewer new Kindle books. I got that part right.

What I didn’t expect, however, was that publishers would be so incredibly foolish as to start raising e-book prices to the point that they were close to, and in a few cases above, the hardcover prices. Here’s a non-literary term for this policy: nuts.

I’ve been keeping loose track of this trend for months, and had noticed that some hardcover books were getting close to the Kindle prices. Then the barrier fell, as the New York Times reported this week, when at least two books actually were more costly to read on Kindle devices than the actual physical book.

How did this happen? It’s a classic Traditional Media vs. the Digital Age story. The key players are Amazon, the major book publishers and Apple.