Thanks Chappers - I just PMd you as I saw the order pop through.
One point I would make, is I think the removal of retail price maintenance on books (when they had to be sold at the list price by law) was a bad move for the book industry and consumers as a whole.
It's killed hundreds of small high street shops, some great and some not so but individual and unique. The other effect is to skew the market. If you're in the top 20 then your sales are huge but the also rans don't get much at all.
Hopefully the technological improvements mean that 'print on demand' and short runs will enable specialist and quirky authors to get a better look in.
I considered an e-book. The economics are interesting - if I sold the book online, my costs would be zero effectively but yours would be the cost of printing out 256 pages. At 2p a sheet that's about the same as the book.
However, I don't think that's as convenient by a long chalk as a properly bound and covered book.
Also, the publisher paid for the illustrations and the editor (she was wonderful even if I did begin to dread her emails) and they promote it to those big online stores.