They should be cheaper.<p>But publishers don&#x27;t really <i>like</i> ebooks because they don&#x27;t control the digital supply chain - which is owned by Amazon, and to a lesser extent Apple and a few also-rans do.<p>Paper pub - B&amp;N, small indies, and the like - has a symbiotic and deferential relationship with the publishers. Amazon is a gorilla the size of New Jersey and would happily eat them all for lunch.<p>So publishing execs are notorious for overpricing ebooks. They don&#x27;t really care if the ebook market shrivels as long as it doesn&#x27;t die completely or take paper with it.<p>Result: ebooks are vastly overpriced, and fewer people are buying.<p>Meanwhile the self-pub gold rush of a few years ago has ended. There&#x27;s not nearly as much 99c &quot;product&quot; being shovelled onto Amazon, and the only writers who are making it are career writers who understand PR and reader retention. The no-talent wannabes saw their sales peak then crash, and they&#x27;ve gone elsewhere.<p>That gives trad pub a little more leverage over content than it had when the gold rush was its peak, and for a while it looked as if it was going to roll over trad pub altogether.<p>I think it&#x27;s a temporary equilibrium. It&#x27;s only working for trad pub because it has such good historical PR, which means too many naive writers still believe being published is a path to cultural glory. As the current generation of naifs dies out the next generation is going to be more realistic about publishing, and they&#x27;ll realise trad pub has less to offer.<p>There will still be the occasional million-seller, but the backlist and mid-list writers will all go direct to digital and manage their own paper print runs if they need to - and they&#x27;ll earn more doing it, even though prices will be lower.