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Concerning the cost of creating ebooks: I think it's important to remember that publishers have to ask a reasonable price for the books they publish. There's a fallacy that ebooks should cost a lot less than paperbacks because they don't need printed, based on the assumption that the printing is expensive. The reality is that per unit the cost of printing is very low; most of the money goes on editing, typesetting and promotion, all of which require dedicated and skilled professionals. They all need paid, they all have mortgages, and somebody has to pay the rent on the publisher's offices. Speaking as an author, I can assure you those people very, very much need to be recompensed adequately for the jobs they perform.
Also - as has been pointed out in other threads and all across the web - online booksellers like Amazon can easily take 50% of the price of an ebook, pushing the returns on sales even lower. And before anyone says 'Baen', the reason their ebooks are so reasonably priced is because they sell them direct from their own website. They don't have to fork 50% of their per unit income over to anyone else every time they sell a file. (And before anyone says 'drm', I'm not disagreeing with you on that. The situation I'm addressing here is an optimal one with no drm, as is the case with my own publisher as well as Baen).
I suggested £5 as a reasonable price to pay for one of their ebooks on Angry Robots' survey. That's around $7.50. A five pound note in the UK will buy you a cheap pub lunch, a take-away from the chippie, a cheap bottle of wine or a ticket to a movie (actually, I think a ticket might be closer to £6), so I think it's a very fair price, although I wouldn't be surprised if they had to charge more to meet their overheads and make a decent enough profit to make selling the e-editions worthwhile at all.
Remember: in most cases even before a book reaches a publishing company, some poor bastard like me has sweated and toiled for a year or more, writing and rewriting and rejigging and reshaping the same hundred thousand words or so into something resembling a decent narrative, knowing the whole time that being an author is a career that makes you squat all in monetary terms -- but you do it anyway. So if you want to read good books, be prepared to pay a reasonable price for them.
There's an old saying that the quickest way to lose a million quid is by getting into publishing; it's a business with one of the narrowest margins of profit there is. This isn't an argument in favour of outrageous price hikes or ebooks going for more than the hardback; far from it. It's about approaching the matter with a clear understanding of the actual economic realities of what it takes to produce a decent quality ebook.
In that light, it strikes me that if you want to support ebooks, one way to do it might be to try and buy them more often directly through the publisher's website whenever it's feasible. That way all the profit goes direct to the publisher, and they don't have to hand half their earnings over to some external online business. That publishers can now indeed sell their books directly to the public in this way is really quite a remarkable thing; and the more ebooks we buy from them directly, the more encouraged they might get.
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