My thought on this is that delivering bits is much much cheaper than cutting down trees, milling them, turning that into paper, mining ore, turning that into ink, applying the ink to the paper, slaughtering cattle, turning that into glue, using the glue to bind the paper together, shipping it to a warehouse, shipping it to a store, paying people at every step of the way…
If it’s cheaper for the publisher, why shouldn’t they pass the savings on to us? The “you should pay more because it’s better” is the same bullshit the music industry tried to pull when they switched to CD. It doesn’t matter that the quality is higher, the delivery costs are lower and I should be seeing those savings, especially if I had to pay up-front for a device to read them and am trying to recoup that upfront cost in cheaper per-unit costs.
This smells to me of protectionism for their other business model. “We can’t price them cheaper, they would cannibalize our dead tree sales!” This is incumbent thinking, and in a proper market would result in the incumbent being eaten by smaller upstarts not chained to the outdated business model.
