Sigh. It seems the publishing industry has not learned from the
mistakes of other, dying industries and is still clinging to quaint
business models.
I wrote about this previously - almost exactly a year ago. Sadly,
nothing has changed and at least in my experience, ebooks as sold by
the major publishing houses are going UP in price, not down. It's
not uncommon to see even old novels by popular authors at $10.99,
$11.99 or even $14.99 instead of $9.99. Of course, Apple was caught
fixing e-book prices, no surprises there. Technical ebooks are even
worse, just browse O'Reilly's or the Pragmatic Programmer's online
stores for examples (at least those tend not to have DRM, but is
that worth the much higher price?).
Nor has DRM been curtailed. It's still easier to pirate ebooks than
buy them online, and this has the advantages of 1) no DRM, 2) wider
selection 3) ability to backup my ebook collection and port it to
new devices. I can, of course crack the DRM top accomplish 3), but
why? It's less hassle just to download it and be done. If I want the
physical book, buying used is still the way to go.
