Do you own trees?
sethgodin.typepad.com
sethgodin.typepad.com
The Amazon kindle is a grab at the book distribution business. Amazon's goal seems to be making the Kindle like iTunes+iPod for books. With iTunes, music publishers are becoming increasingly dependent on a single store for a major chunk of their sales. It's plausible that one day soon, iTunes will have serious leverage in promoting songs and shaping the tastes of music consumers. Needless to say, this would be extremely painful for the studios.
Similarly, if Amazon can help you find the books you want, and sell them to you, and deliver them to you, what value do publishers add at all? Publishers deliver value by selecting, developing, and promoting books. If the captive Kindle audience gets big enough, what is left to publishers? Copy edit a book and wholesale it to Amazon? That may be a business but it's not publishing as we know it today; the margins are vastly smaller.
Owning the distribution channel would be tremendously lucrative, which is why Amazon is happy taking a loss on each Kindle book they sell. The publishers are justified in fearing it, but they'd be better served by developing a Kindle alternative that makes both them and their end users happy than sitting on their hands and pretending nothing's changing.
Assuming, of course, that lower prices mean less profits. That's not always true. It's more complex than that.
28 gigabytes of ebooks. Why would publishers even want to encourage digital formats? Obviously, ANY tactic that will slow the inevitable is good for them.
My guess why this isn't happening is because Publishing house X shares half its board of directors with Publishing house Y, and they have some sort of (probably implicit, since probably illegal) agreement to do whatever is necessary to keep a lock on the industry, by restricting access through new digital channels. See also: the music industry, the film industry, the television industry.