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Right now most publishers are afraid of e-books, they know it's a big potential market, but they look at music and saw what happened.
The outside pressure is much smaller for them since it's not so easy to convert print books in e form by regular people, so the amount of illegal content is limited to high popularity/committed fan base stuff by and large, and considering that not that many people are reading e-books, for high popularity it's a drop in a bucket, for committed fan base, they buy the print or legal e-book if they can afford it anyway, while if they cannot now, they may do so in the future.
So overall there is no large market for e-books, hence price discovery does not happen.
If there will be a cool e-book reading device that everyone wants (and it's not going to be dedicated, the odds are against it unless it's ridiculously cheap - more likely a good cheap umpc), and e-books become more popular, current prices will either drop and drm will go away or illegal content will overwhelm the legal one.
The crucial question is can you sustain an industry on that and on what business model? Unclear, and unresolved as of now...
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