Want to know how to silence a book publisher? Ask him about his pricing strategy for electronic books. It is a subject guaranteed to send a shiver down the spine of an industry suffering from a deep-discounting retail culture that is subsidised by fat margins exacted from publishers. It is also a subject that will come under scrutiny today when publishers meet in Frankfurt for the annual book fair, the biggest in the world.

The successful launch of the Sony Reader (pictured) and Amazon Kindle has focused minds on how much consumers should pay for e-books. According to David Roth-Ey, director of digital business development at HarperCollins in the UK, being last in the digital market has advantages: “Books are late to the game of digitisation and so we can look at the way that music, film and television have faced these challenges more or less successfully.”