One of the key questions confronting the future of digital reading is where to find the best source of material for the new devices. Since Amazon (AMZN) broke through with the Kindle, the assumption has been that books would drive the development of software for this new hardware.

Unfortunately, book publishers are wary of e-books. The devices are selling at an impressive pace, but a runaway content success has yet to emerge. And a quick look at the top 10 items on the Kindle bestseller list—where nine are often free promotions—shows why: The Kindle offers precious little revenue right now to justify the investment. That hasn’t stopped Canadian romance publisher Harlequin from launching a new e-books division. But Harlequin has had a very good year and can afford to take the risk. In New York, e-books remain an afterthought at the six big publishing firms, where they’re doubling down on their search for hits.

HarperCollins’ CEO Brian Murray underscored the issue this month when he discussed his company’s recent earnings release with the publishing industry’s trade organ, publishersmarketplace.com. Although e-book sales were somewhere near 4 percent of Harper’s revenue, which works out to be about $13 million for the quarter, Murray didn’t see the sector as "meaningful ... to drive an increase in our bottom line." There simply weren’t enough devices in use to drive the kind of steady growth a business needs to survive, according to the CEO. Instead, e-book revenue experiences "step-level changes when there's a new device in the marketplace."

Forrester research is projecting nearly a million e-readers will be sold this holiday season, a “step-level change” in anybody’s book. But book publishers aren’t anticipating an opportunity to grow revenues. Macmillan just got aggressive in the opposite direction. In a new boilerplate contract circulated throughout the industry last month, Macmillan’s CEO John Sargent made it clear that the firm would treat e-books not as a potential new product that might open a line for the contracting company, but as a subsidiary right to milk for margin.

If Macmillan saw the possibility for real revenue growth in e-books, it wouldn’t be shaving points from the author’s share. Macmillan’s new contract offers authors a straight 20 percent of net revenues received from e-books, whether Macmillan publishes the e-books itself or licenses the rights to another firm. That’s a worse deal than at Simon & Schuster or Random House, two companies that recently made their own moves to reduce the e-book royalty.

Instead of looking for new worlds to conquer, Sargent is going back to the future. The same day the new contract was circulating, the CEO announced that his Henry Holt division would now be run by legendary publisher Steve Rubin, who had just been marginalized at Random House. Rubin built Doubleday on franchise authors like John Grisham. Two days after arriving, he confirmed that his role at Holt would be to bring firepower to the boutique house. He paid mid-six figures, which is publishing talk for $250,000, for New Yorker-writer Betsy Kolbert’s book on mass species extinction. Publishers like to put some blood in the water when they arrive at a new house. But those rules were chiseled in another era. There are fewer big books these days that can cover the large unearned advances. Even the best houses can go several seasons without the one book that will balance their books.