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It isn't quite that equivalent. Try comparing how many people Adobe employed for years to create the whole CS5 suite versus 900 pages from an author.
How many man-years did Lonesome Dove require to write? I'll be generous and say three man-years.
Adobe has over 9,000 employees in total (from their Yahoo finance profile). I don't know for sure but I imagine about one third of the company works on that suite (versus Flash, Acrobat, and a couple of other odd projects). I'll be conservative and call the effort to release CS5 3,000 man-years (much of the CS5 suite takes more than 12 months between cycles).
So you're comparing 3 to 3000. That's two orders of magnitude and it just so happens to nearly match with the price difference you noted ($12.99 to $2K). Also a large proportion of CS5 users qualify for upgrade pricing.
In reality, prices in unregulated markets are always what the market will bear. But the example you cited just happens to have a rule-of-thumb answer as well.
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