The current UK number one hardback fiction title, Private Games by Patterson & Sullivan, selling a less than overwhelming five thousand copies is selling through Amazon at £9.49, with a Kindle edition at £6.39. The previous week’s number one, Stuart MacBride’s Birthdays for the Dead, is currently selling for £7.00 in hardback and £6.99 in Kindle.

Private Games is at thirty six on the kindle charts. Birthdays for the Dead at a hundred and twenty six. There are a grand total of three titles in the Kindle top fifty with prices over five pounds.

A hardback at £9 look over priced by comparison with the e-book, and a £6 e-book looks over priced when ‘everybody knows’ e-books are so cheap to produce. It is bad equally for author, publisher and retailer. Above all it is bad for books.

Cutting hard back prices back to paperback levels devalues the entire chain and is indicative that despite brave talk and good intentions publishers are allowing e-book price deflation to dictate the whole book market.

It also puts publishers in the lousy position of appearing to devalue ooks by punting out absurdly priced hard backs at the same time as seeming to rip readers off by over pricing e-books. Ouch.

What they need to do is do what the music industry has begun to do with vinyl and hold the line on hardback editions at fifteen quid ($20) plus but give the e-books away with the hardback (easily done from a technical point of view). Or give the hardback away for those readers who choose the e-book as their principle edition.

This rewards loyal fans by allowing them to have first go at the authors they love in an edition that suits them, but does so at a price that makes sense and can sustain not just publishers, but authors and, all importantly, booksellers other than Amazon.

This is a proposition that would make sense to consumers, particularly if publishers continue to make efforts to really add value by making beautiful hardbacks. It also opens up the possibility of e-books representing a genuine third edition: so that you have a proper hard back, which is genuinely price differentiated from the paperback, a paper back with an e-book edition at a sensible £3.99-4.99 price followed by a backlist edition with an e-book at the kinds of £1.99 price the market prefers.