Woah, this thread is all over the place
Regarding ebook prices at Amazon, they are set with one thing only in mind: Maximising profits for Amazon. They are very, very good at finding the price which will bring them the most income. They have, after all, a lot of experience and a huge db of sales to analyse. They might even use some sort of self-learning neural net thingy to do this, as an expert system might miss parameters which would otherwise be hard to pin down, like season trends for individual authors in individual countries.
I'm guessing about the details here, and the actual processes for this are naturally kept a close secret, but you get my meaning. Incidentally this probably also maximises the profits for the publisher and author (albeit only on sales through Amazon; very low Amazon prices might hurt sales through other venues). Most authors get a percentage of sales income as royalties.
From a customer perspective this leads to some strange consequenses. A
licence for downloading a file which might get cancelled at the whim of Amazon, and certainly will become obsolete as their DRM servers go offline sometime in the future, can cost more than a paper copy shipped to your door. The production cost of a paper book including stocking and transport arguably exceeds distribution costs of an ebook, and
this does not matter at all.
All that matters is how much the average customer is willing to pay for each version. As it turns out from the evidence of prices, people are in some cases willing to pay more for a Kindle book, probably because of convenience and reading habits. On this forum I'm probably not alone in preferring an ebook version
The same thing is the case for regional pricing... it irks me no end, and is a fossil in the age of the internet. To make matters worse all my Amazon recommendation emails contain the low, low American prices... I'm actually in a support chat with Amazon on that one right now. But that is probably taking the thread off-topic again