Main menu Post navigation Over-delivering the Archive Publishers are having a problem with ebooks. The problem is that the new tablet readers are working and ebooks are selling, but there are worrying signs that prices are falling, competition is increasing, and there is a race to the bottom. Best-selling print books used to cost $24.99 $19.99 or $14.99. Now there is an increasing tendency for best sellers to be priced low , low , and lower . It is partly because of Amazon and Apple's success at controlling the users and their increasing dominance over pricing and discounts that is leading big publishers to consolidate. The book publisher's nightmare is that they become irrelevant as the book that customers buy is an increasingly trivial electronic object. Apple and especially Amazon disintermediate the publisher, traditionally placed between the author and the reader, by directly connecting the two parties. It doesnt help that the simplicity and ease of producing an ebook mean that the publication process appears to bring nothing to the party. Anybody can now produce an ebook from a book-sized Word file. Since the book publishers are so uneasy about their precarious postion in the tablet publishing process, it is perhaps strange that many magazine publishers have decided that digital magazines should be treated in much the same way as ebooks. Many of our best magazines, to pick two standout examples: The Week and The Economist have taken the view that their iPad apps should work in pretty much the