I’m a fan of publishers taking charge of their own destiny, especially when the future is so uncertain.

That said, I just don’t think publishers have the right skill sets right now to actually set prices for consumer facing products.

They need to work very hard to get those skills though, because, as long as they are setting prices without knowing what they are doing, the longer they’ll make bad decisions and probably hurt themselves in the long term.

More than three-quarters of people working in the book trade believe e-books should be priced at current street prices or less, according to early results of a FutureBook survey into digital thinking. The majority of respondents indicated that publishers are best placed to set this price, even though they don’t believe the agency model has a long-term future.

via Publishers should set e-book prices, says FutureBook survey | theBookseller.com.