The growth of e-books is rattling publishers:

Hardback books could be killed off if Amazon’s e-books and Google’s digital library force publishers to slash prices, Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette, has warned.

Mr Nourry said unilateral pricing by Google, Amazon and other e-book retailers such as Barnes & Noble could destroy publishers’ profits.

He said publishers were “very hostile” to Amazon’s pricing strategy – over which the online retailer failed to consult publishers – to charge $9.99 for all its e-books in the US. He also pointed to plans by Google to put millions of out-of-copyright books online for public use.

“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said.

Er … and?

I want to buy the new Michael Connelly book, The Scarecrow. It’s not out in paperback yet.

The hardback from Amazon costs £9.42, half the ‘original’ price.

But if I order it as an e-book via Waterstone’s it costs £14.86! Even though I am buying a mainly carbon-free version which costs nothing to deliver and uses no paper and all the vicious chemicals needed to print the paper. The far cheaper US e-version can not be bought online (it seems) outside the USA and Canada.

These people are crazy. They are trying to replicate a model which made sense for technical and financial reasons decades ago (bring out an expensive hard-back version, then a while later a cheaper paperback version) but makes no sense now.

Where o where is the environmentalist lobby railing against this madness?