Tom, what a great, great post. Intelligent and to the point. I'm not really familiar with all these goings on (and the little I do know is thanks to you) but I'm a consumer with an income and a credit card to spend it. I recognize all the categories of customers you mention, but like you would expect, things are more complicated than market statistics will make you believe. One example is myself: I love reading. It occupies 90% of my computer use. But even though I don't mind reading stories on the computer, it pains me to read books/magazines/newspapers in digital format if I can avoid it. That being said, I'm also big on instant gratification (something I was taught by the internet) and still I don't like hardbacks: I recently bought a book via Amazon and actually groaned in disappointment when I got the bigass package in the mail. I hadn't realized I was buying the hardback version. Hardbacks are too big, heavy and difficult to carry around to read everywhere, which is my main activity, reading-on-the-go. For that reason, even though I want the book NOW (and for that might yield to an ebook) I also don't want it in hardback format, so again it's either wait or, you guessed it, yield to the ebook. You can see where this is going for me, can't you? But I'm just a slightly weird customer in a sea of equally idiosincratic customers. Also, don't I remember something about the latest Dan Brown book? Did it not sell as many, if not more, ebooks on the day of release than hard copies? Or was that the audiobook (which is even more surprising)? Won't that make the publisher actually rethink the need for instant gratification vs hard copies?