[GreenMonkey]

This is part of why I'm amused at the agency pricefixing schemes. It's pretty basic economics that lowering prices can lead to higher demand. It's all in finding the right balance of price vs demand.

I hate DRM with a passion and almost never buy anything with it. In my eyes DRM devalues a book by quite a bit - still, I'll buy a DRM'd book at "rental" pricing. Same way I put up with DRM'd videogames when they go under $10.

With ebooks lacking the printing / distribution costs of a paper book, there's a real opportunity here for ebooks to increase sales, like DVDs did for a long time. You can move a lot of units at $4 and $6 that you might not otherwise.

Instead, they seem to cling to the same model the music industry did - keeping prices more in line with the old pricing and try to keep them there. That said, I'm sure they sell a lot of music on the periodic Amazon album sales when they dip to $6, $4, $3, etc.

I think a better scheme is to start higher, and drop prices over time, like the DVD market. The price drop from hardcover to paperback moves units...a few later price drops to put them in $6 bargain bin DVD pricing, and then to $.99 or $1.99 even, seems like it would be a good scheme.

You can't move it too fast - to some extent, cutthroat pricing is what IMO killed the anime market - but over time, it should drop. A book that is 10 years old should really be at pricing that is more in line with a used bookstore hardcover or paperback than $12 or $16.