Case in point: Love in the Afternoon (released June 29, 2010) by Lisa Kleypas. Ebook is $7.99, mass market paperback is $4.79.

I refuse to pay a premium for an ebook, when the paperback is available for so much less.

If you’re going to shaft your ebook customers with “publisher-set” higher pricing, I’m going to simply boycott buying your ebook or print editions.

I bring a different concern to your blog that of availability!! I live in Canada and have an e-reader from Sony. I am increasingly annoyed about the availability of your fantasy books through their site. For instance LE Modesitt Jr’s series the Saga of Recluce, Natural Ordermage is availabale through Sony’s site for purchase in Canada.
The previous 2 books, Well Sping of Chaos and Odermaster are NOT available to be sold on Sony’s site for Canada! How is this possible??

My question then is this, How do the books get released for sale in Canada in e format? Is there going to be a big push to get more of your fantasy books in e format available to Canadians?

Okay, I’m better now. I’ve printed this blog out so I can mail it to my representative when you go crying to congress that piracy has driven you out of business.

Not only will I never buy a book from you, and not only will I discourage friends and family from buying a book from you, I will no encourage authors currently printing with you to end their contracts with you.

I drink to the day you go bankrupt.

Tonight I tried to purchase another book, published first 7 years ago. Much to my surprise is was nearly $16 and Amazon had clearly labeled this as the price the PUBLISHER had set. No sale. DO YOU HEAR ME? NO SALE! I might have paid $9.99 but $16? LOL! In the past year I’ve read about 60 books, all of them legally purchased and all of them $9.99 or less. No more. You’re about to experience what the music industry has been experiencing and you’ve done it to yourselves.

I laugh at your quoting of the hardcover price. Who pays that? No one I know walks into a bookstore and forks that over. If it’s not discounted I and everyone I know walks away. I read many books in just a few sittings. $25 for that? I guess we can all dream right? Next you’ll be posting huge “losses” from piracy because all of those downloads could have been sales at your dream “list price”. Your greed sickens me, as a consumer you’ve lost me. If this continues I predict the e-pub world will grow quite slowly, if at all. Nice going…

Reading has been a favorite hobby since I was a young child, however, as life got busier, I read less and less. The books I did read had to either be worth spending the money on a hardback or borrowed from a friend. As a result, I read fewer than 10 books a year.

In addition, I was running out of space for books. Both my husband and I love books and don’t throw them away so storage was always an issue.

When it looked like the Kindle was here to stay, we bought two. If there’s a book we both want to read, we swap Kindles, just like a regular book. I’ve learned about many new authors through the recommendations that Kindle provides. In addition, books have now become an impulse buy. Since July 2009, I have bought and read 57 books – a far cry from the ten per year that I read in the past. My old hobby is back full force.

It appears from the New Yorker article that the publishing industry is hoping the iPad will be its savior. I have no plans to buy the iPad; I already own an iPhone. I certainly won’t buy any electronic device in its first generation. Finally, as the New Yorker piece pointed out, Steve Jobs is no stranger to raising prices when it works for him. In one year, your company could be in the very same position with a different foe.

I certainly understand the company’s concerns regarding pricing of the books and potential profit losses. But there were always be books I won’t buy on Kindle – cookbooks, art books, design books. No e-reader can replace those. However, the price wars are merely serving to keep books out of the hands of readers like me.

You lost a sale. And a customer. And I’m not alone. Just reading the comments on your blog, I can see I’m in like company at being fed up with your pricing model. Had you priced it a few dollars cheaper, I would have bought it for my Kindle. The whole reason I even found this blog was because I came to the Macmillan site from Amazon to complain to you about the price.

The e-book reader crowd are the early adopters of this next generation of book format. This format is not going away, no matter how hard you try to ignore it. You are generating extremely bad PR for yourselves and will be increasingly shunned by your future e-book readers as this format moves forward.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling you’ll just chalk up the lower sales numbers to piracy and lobby for even more draconian laws to protect your old way of doing things. Even if that’s not true, that’s what my generation thinks is true because that’s the image you present to us.

My parents never taught me to pay attention to the publisher of a book before buying it. Why in the world would they? It didn’t matter when I was growing up. I’ll be teaching my kids to pay attention, though. Guess which publisher is one I’ll be teaching them to stay away from?