Not long ago the typical price of eBooks in the USA was at $9.99 USD. Now it is at $14.99 USD. That is a 50% increase in about a year. Plus we used to get our eBooks without sales tax but now more often than not we have to pay the greedy states their taxes, so I'm now paying $16.19 USD. Many books are much higher of course.

Not only is the price not competitive with pBooks in many cases, but neither is the quality. Publishers still have no darn clue as to how to format eBooks, so you get a lot of eBooks with no TOCs, broken links, huge margins, et cetera. Without competition there is no consumer recourse of action. If I want to by a particular copyrighted book I have only one choice of publisher as the publisher almost always has exclusive rights to a book. If we could chose between several publishers they would have to be competitive to make the sales, but instead we are stuck with monopolies who don't care about quality and can charge whatever they want to.