Just about every day there are stories about how print is dead, publishers need to be on tablets, digital publishing is the future, and if you don’t hurry up you’ll be left behind.

It is certainly true that readers are consuming more and more content on digital platforms. On Amazon.com, sales of eBooks exceed sales of printed books in many markets, and in other segments of the publishing industry consumers often prefer digital delivery to print delivery.

It is not at all clear that trend will continue.

The cost of print is generally estimated to be no more than 8 percent of the publisher’s cost of bringing content to market. Many costs — author fees, overhead, marketing, etc. — are the same whether you deliver print or pixels. Furthermore, in some cases creating a digital version of content can add costs.

Yet consumers expect digital to cost much less. They think publishers save a lot of money on printing, and consumers think they ought to benefit from the savings with a lower price.

If all this is true, why are the prices so out of whack? If you look at the difference in price between a paperback and an eBook, it’s far more than 8 percent. The fairly obvious conclusion is that prices are not accurately reflecting costs. In the current market, the printed edition of a title is subsidizing the digital edition.

Sooner or later that is going to have to change, and when it does — when the price difference between the eBook and the paper book is roughly 8 percent plus shipping — will sales of eBooks keep going at the pace they’re going now? I don’t think so.

The ugly truth is that for all the hype about digital publishing, very few publishers are actually making any money at it.

Here’s the first sentence from The digital tinkering continues – and that’s a good thing.

Revenues may finally be catching up with the investments publishers have been making in their digital businesses.

I’m reminded of two proverbs — “Fools rush in,” and “A fool and his money are soon parted.” Of course proverbs are tricky. There’s also “He who hesitates is lost” and “Cast your bread upon the waters,” so … be careful about that sort of thing.

Still, it seems to me that the wise course is to look for easy, cheap, obvious wins on the digital front, and to allow publishers with money to burn to experiment. Sooner or later they’ll stumble on the right solution, and then we can all imitate them.

But most of all, don’t be fooled by the digital hype. Look at the numbers. They’re not all that great.