Dude, you are so wrong. Also? You have an interesting habit of shifting goal posts.
The arrival of the Kindle and Amazon's push absolutely made ebooks a bigger part of the market, but they were thriving quite nicely before then.
This is part of the problem with some of the stuff I'm seeing in these threads--ya'll have no idea that ebooks are better than twenty years old as consumer commercial products.
Yes, but represented under 1% of the market in January 2009. So tell me, what percent of the market did they represent in 1991?
It's a different world today. Different, really, than even two years ago, let alone fifteen or twenty. Fifteen years ago there were ebooks (actually, ezines, too; I edited and was briefly producer for an intl trade zine that did an e-edition back in the mid nineties). But they were small potatoes, in terms of sales. So small that publishers bought the rights as an afterthought, sometimes (and often didn't at all - which is why there's lawsuits pending regarding some large publishers now claiming they have ebook rights to older works and writers contesting that).
Push it forward to 2008. Ebooks are growing again. This time, it might really happen. The Kindle was released in Nov 2007, and 2008 saw early adopters buying Kindles and buying ebooks in greater quantities than ever before. Publishers got together, cranked some numbers, and figured that by 2015, ebooks might actually be pushing a billion dollars a year. That's about 1/16th of the US consumer publishing industry right now.
Fast forward to 2010, and things start changing fast. Kindle 3 and Amazon's huge push, plus iPad, plus the availability of good quality ebooks and good quality reading software for cell phones, and some other factors = a big surge. Ebooks rise from maybe 2-3% in January to 8% in December, based on conservative estimates.
Around Dec/Jan, B&N announces they've already hit their sales targets for 2014.
In April, the AAP announces that Feb numbers show ebooks outselling MMP.
That means ebooks if not right now very soon will be the primary publishing format - the format where the most sales are made, the most revenue won. And the result of that is pretty easy to anticipate: publishers are demanding digital rights. In fact, newer contracts are also demanding "interactive multimedia" rights, because *those* rights probably (untested in courts so far, but likely from what I've been told) include most forms of enhanced ebooks.
I don't know if some folks are negotiating to keep the interactive multimedia or not; I'd have to ask around. But what I am hearing with *extreme* consistency from every writer I talk to is that no "big publishing" corporation is buying just print rights anymore. No digital means no contract. They'd be fools to do otherwise; by the time any book bought today comes out, digital will be their bread and butter, and they know it.
I get you have a background here. I'm not a total neophyte myself, and I do know most of the history involved here, although it sounds like I lack your depth of experience on this. I respect that. But I can only tell you what I am hearing - with complete consistency - from writers, and that is that they cannot sell print rights without digital anymore. If anyone has recent personal experience to the contrary, I would love to hear it.