If you're looking for other sources, I can suggest
Bean's Webscriptions site. If you like the sort of thing they publish, then it's a treasure trove. They have a "Free Library" so you can try out a number of their offerings gratis -- the better to get you hooked, of course.
I'm assuming you already know about Project Gutenberg, and their public domain offerings, but you may not know that
ManyBooks.net offers a Sony Reader formatted version of most of the PG holdings, which is very nice.
And that doesn't mention the effort going on here at MR to do 'deluxe editions' of public domain stuff for the Reader.
I agree that it'd be a different ballgame if Steve Jobs were in it, but the music industry is markedly different from the pub industry -- most music has been in the consumers' hands digitally for years, which means they were already at the table. That's just not the case for books, so the pubs have to be convinced that they need to come to the table in the first place, as such a heavy handed approach would just not work -- something about flies and vinegar comes to mind, for some reason.
Anyway, the pubs still largely have physical control of what we'd like to have digitally, so they can exert more pressure on pricing than the music folks could, who lost that control a long time ago (before they realized they wanted it).
One example from Baen: most of their individual books (excepting advanced reader copies), are $6 or less, but one book they have available (
Off Armageddon Reef) which is actually a Tor publishing book is $18 (hardback's $26.95, I think) -- clearly there is a limit to how much Baen could convince Tor to lower their price, or that book would also be ~$6.
The book and music and video markets only compare to each other just so far, before the similarities evaporate. However, we've seen a lot more digital movement in the book industry in the last five years or so than in ... well, than in about a century.
Certainly that's a good thing, and something we want to encourage.
