I'm curious about the 25% number you mention in the original post. It may be true for some publishers who stress the library market, but I have a hard time believing it's true overall.
I agree that the market for $25 fiction is pretty specialized. Hardback pricing does target library use, setting a (relatively) high royalty and price relative to cost to recognise that many of the books will be re-used. Of course, the pricing also recognizes that many of us are getting old enough that our eyes struggle with the font size in mass market paperback.
I'll certainly go along with any horror stories about DRM, and recognize that there is such a thing as collectors. Still, there are a lot of authors out there who can't even make a couple of thousand bucks on a good book they spent thousands of hours on. When we see our books being traded around the Internet and when they hear people talking about how sharing doesn't hurt anyone, it does get on our nerves. At least that's my experience.
If we can agree that the eBook market is broken, maybe we can segue into what we can do to fix it. Losing DRM might be part of the answer, and aggressive pricing may be part of the answer too. I don't believe the combination solves things, though, and I do believe that eBooks are the way to read.
Rob Preece
Publisher,
www.BooksForABuck.com