You know they are just cutting their own throats.
If they raise prices on e-books why would anyone want to pay hundreds of dollars to view them?
We will just go back to the hard covers and paperbacks.
Now if Macmillan finds that the cost of printing to be exorbitant now and in the future, and their profit margin starts going down, well, that will be because of their greed.
There is no way that the cost of producing an e-book copy matches the cost of hardcover editions. This is greed first and foremost.
It is also sad for the hundreds of thousands that have already bought the Kindle, they will be stuck with the rising cost of titles.
For myself, I’m glad I held off.
I will just be content to buy my paperbacks as always.

Amazon was getting into distorting its business model by sacrificing its retail margins to give Kindle an edge.  They should be thankful that MacMillan dope slapped them back to reality.  Kindle will never, ever be successful at the hardware business.  Kindle gave them this illusion that they might be a hardware player, but that pipe dream collapses as soon as the Apple’s of the world muscle in on the e-reader business.  They should stick to what they are good at, and in that, they are the best in the world.

I mean Amazon, will never, ever be successful at the hardware business.

@ Michael Baughn:

Your argument would make sense if you were just buying the book for the paper and ink.  But you’re not. You’re buying it for the ideas on the page. Ask yourself this: Which would general public pay more for, the new Stephen King novel, or some random work of fiction by an unknown author on Lulu.com?

Big-name authors get big fees, just like big-name actors get big fees in Hollywood. Macmillan thinks they have a product that justifies the price—based on the content, not the means of getting that content to you.

Big-name authors get big fees, just like big-name actors get big fees in Hollywood. Macmillan thinks they have a product that justifies the price—based on the content, not the means of getting that content to you.

There is only one tiny fact getting in the way of this analysis: paperbacks cost less than the e-version for the same authors. When it comes to reading for entertainment, the convenience of an e-reader is not going to outweigh a 50% price difference, especially when you toss in the initial cost of the reader.

When “e-versions” of music hit the market, the price of songs and albums were at least competitive, if not lower than the media versions. And it took off like a Titan III with no payload.

MacMillan seems to be looking only at e-version costs vs. hardcover. I think that will prove to be a mistake because the vast bulk of sales come from paperbacks.

When it comes to reading for entertainment, the convenience of an e-reader is not going to outweigh a 50% price difference, especially when you toss in the initial cost of the reader.

@ zewazir:  Perhaps you have already read an ebook on a Kindle, and in that case, we must disagree about whether or not “...the convenience of an e-reader is not going to outweigh a 50% price difference.”  But what I discovered when I was able to do so is that this new mode of book-reading was quite pleasant in its own right, and so much more convenient in multiple ways than paper-book reading, that I could see paying double the price to read an ebook.  And I think I would not have expected that prior to experiencing my own hands-on Kindle-reading.

As to whether the additional cost of the reader would outweigh those benefits, that question will be irrelevant to me because I will be reading all my Kindle ebooks on my iPad, which I would have bought anyway, regardless of whether it is a better or worse way to read a book.