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Why shouldn't the makers of, let's say, ball-point pens be able to determine their selling price? No more competition (remember, competition is bad ... right?). If you want a Bic pen, you pay what the company tells you. Wal-Mart can't sell pens cheaper than Staples, and neither one can sell them cheaper than Peter's Precious Pen Palace.
It's part of the free enterprise system: manufacturers, whether of pens or books, set the wholesale price; retailers pay the wholesale price and set the retail price.
If the authors are selling books -- or pens -- from their website, they're acting as retailers and they can charge whatever they feel like. But when they're selling through a third party, who then resells the items to the public, they're wholesalers, and they should, like any wholesaler, be determining the wholesale price (what they sell the book to Amazon for), but not the retail price (what Amazon sells the book to you for).
It scares me that so many people who laud the free market have no understanding of how it works.
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