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There's a delicate balance between price and demand, and the type of reader who is purchasing.
For example, a lot of people will pay $25 or more for a hardback Harry Potter book, or a new Michael Connolly book, or a new Stephen King book. For many of those people this may be the only, or one of only a few books they buy that year. These people are price-insensitive; books are not an ongoing expense for them, and while their per capita purchases are very small, probably the majority of people who buy books follow this pattern so the market is huge. So if you want to jack the price up on anything it should be blockbuster bestsellers.
Voracious readers like myself view things differently. We balance perceived value with price. For authors we are fans of, we will pay the "bestseller" price. I read up to 3 books per day, so I try not to buy as much as possible, but when I can get a Harlequin romance at $3.50 I might pass up what seems to be a comparable-quality romance priced at $9.99 and opt for the cheaper book (after all I can get nearly 3 of them for the price of the other book). It depends on how much I WANT that $9.99 book and whether I can get it another cheaper way (library? ebook loan? paperback loan? used pb?).
I have read some books where they were OK but I feel like I paid $5-7 too much for them; they were $2.99 of book quality value in a $9.99 package.
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