I chose the first option, though I expect to be in the minority by the time enough people vote.
I understand budget concerns, especially with people who read over 100 books a year, but I virtually never factor in ebook vs pbook price in my buying decisions. It's just not relevant to me.
The argument I often see for cheaper ebooks goes along the lines of, 'I prefer ebooks but they aren't printed on paper and so don't cost the publisher nearly as much so I shouldn't have to pay as much.' I don't view it as being owed a certain price by the publishers depending on their expenses. I view it as supply and demand- the publishers will charge what people will buy it at, and it's as simple as that. The only caveat is sensible government oversight to prevent monopolies, price gouging and the like. I do give that we're living in the 'Wild West' of ebook pricing, or at least as the Wild West is beginning to be reined in- publishers vs sellers, sometimes wildly fluctuating price ranges, sometimes crazily priced ebooks, publishers flailing about at times.
The major difference between ebook and pbook for me in the buying is the used books factor- used pbooks can be sold for a fraction of the new cost while ebooks are always the new cost. With ebooks comes the ability to pirate for free, but that is illegal while cheap used pbooks are (usually) legal. Also, you can borrow either type from the library depending, but in general it's much easier to loan someone a pbook to read than the narrow avenues to loaning them an ebook.
Anyway, I basically always buy ebooks instead of pbooks unless the ebook isn't available or rarely when I want the layout/graphics/whatever of the pbook (the illustrated A Brief History of Time comes to mind... though I might've bought the ebook if the illustrated version had an ebook counterpart). Maybe if the price difference is really exorbitant (say the ebook is more than $25 U.S. higher than the pbook) then I would consider the pbook because of price but it hasn't happened yet.
A slight aside, but I am pondering beginning to up my (small at present) read pbook collection though. I'm finding that whenever I look at my bookshelf (oh, who am I kidding, pile of books, though arranged as aesthetically pleasing as possible) it only reminds me of my favourite books before I started reading ebooks. I generally only keep (kept) around my favourites and lost some favourites to unreturned loans which is why the collection is small, but of course with ebooks all my favourites in the last say decade are just stored on a device. So I'm considering starting to collect all my favourites in pbook form to form a tiny library just for the aesthetic and tactile enjoyment of it, as well as so that visitors may strike up a conversation about more recent favourites now and not only about my tattered copies of Portrait of a Lady and War and Peace again for the hundredth time.
