Why pay for an e-book? ---- Part IV: Will books survive?

In parts I and II we have discovered that because e-books are expensive, many people are trying to find ways to avoid paying for them. In part III it was shown that bookstores are already disappearing, and publishers will follow. So if there are no bookstores and no publishers will there still be books? Will we need authors to write them?

We can look at these questions in various ways. The most immediate one is to notice that it's not that books are not being read or not being written. The army of middlemen is disappearing. On an average $15 book, the author makes $1.50, the bookstore $5 and the publisher (who does the editing, the printing, transportation, storage and takes the risk) the remainder. But nowadays an author may write a book on his computer, transfer it to a server, sell it to a customer through his website who will then read the book on his e-reader.

Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part III: Bookstores and Publishers

In parts I & II we have discovered that some publishers of e-books charge more for an e-book than a paperback copy even though their e-book expenses are practically zero. This has resulted in people attempting to get the e-book for free in various ways. These include downloading the book from dubious sites or buying a single copy, breaking the protection and sharing. When an estimated 60-80% of the population is engaged in these activities I wonder if the word legal has any meaning. Sound familiar?

Of course it does: The music industry. In fact the music industry faced the same problems the book industry is facing today. They too had exorbitant prices (like $20 for 12 songs.) They too paid little to the creator (10-15%). The customer's money funded a feast for an army of middle men. Then the average Joe, armed with a computer and a CD drive made copies of his CDs for his friends and before you know it no one was buying CDs from record stores. It might have been wise for these guys to lower their prices, to make it a burden to copy a cheap CD when you can have the original with the jacket notes.