I recently installed an 'ebook' reader on my Palm Treo. I went to the Palm Web site where they have lots of ebooks for sale, but the prices are quite silly. Recent releases--the books you are most likely to want to read on an airplane--are priced at about what you would pay for a paper copy on Amazon or some other big box book store. Some books are as little as five dollars, and many others are ten dollars or more. "Classic" books have even more baffling prices. Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" cost ten dollars, while a much more recent book, H. Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" can be snapped up for three dollars. For the life of me, I cannot make any sense of the pricing. Three dollars is about where I start to get interested, but who is going to pay $15 or $20 to read a book on a tiny, two inch square screen.
Part of the problem appears to be fear. The publishers fear that once a book has been downloaded, people will simply pass it around without paying for another copy. But it high prices that make this more likely than low prices, and this is the same issue the music industry have been struggling with. DRM (Digital Rights Management) annoys honest customers, and has little or no impact on dishonest people. So it is quite difficult to see what is accomplished with overpriced digital versions of things, other than to slow sales down.