I have two ebook readers, the first of which was purchased a little more than two years ago, right around the time the first Kindle came out (neither is a Kindle). I hang out a lot on ebook forums, picking up tips and tricks and finding out places to get ebooks (legally). I've had to start avoiding those places the past few days because they are bad for my blood pressure. The entitlement and the butthurt and the paranoia and the refusal to engage in a reasonable discussion is just getting to me. I know you're all seeing it in comments at Whatever, Making Light, etc.
I've tried in various fora to explain that the price for ALL ebooks will not be $15 forever, and that Amazon WOULD want to keep the price $9.99 forever, so won't you be better off with eventually being able to pay $5.99 rather than $9.99, if you just wait a year or so like you used to have to wait for paperbacks? To which the response is: but Macmillan is charging $15 now for books available in MMPB. To which I reply, I understand your concern, but perhaps you should wait for the new pricing paradigm to be in place? To which the reply is, but they're not doing it now, so they won't in the future.
*bangs head on desk*
Yes, things are screwy now, but they are trying to fix it! I personally see this new paradigm as huge news, and good news for EVERYONE--publishers, retailers, authors, consumers. Everyone except Amazon, which wants to control all the content, and special snowflakes who must have cheap ebooks RIGHT THE HECK NOW. (And I submit that Amazon caused part of this by using access to $9.99 bestsellers as one of its selling points for the Kindle. That's never been a good reason to buy an ebook reader IMO.)
Communication in these venues is further complicated because a lot of the "commenters" are from the "information wants to be free" crowd, and a lot of the BNFs in the ebook world are self-publishers who have achieved some form of success with their efforts, in that they've sold a few thousand copies of their books (or so they claim). They are anti-"Big Publishing" because of course Big Publishing refused to publish their works of genius, but they are selling them, so Big Publishing is wrong! wrong! wrong! Never realizing if they were willing to accept some constructive criticism and do a little more work on their magnum opii (did I get that plural correct? dunno), Big Publishing would have been delighted to present their works to a much larger potential audience. I've read some of these m.o.s, and yes, they would be publishable with a little work.
I thought you would like an overview of the opposition.
For my own part, these days most of what I'm reading on my ebook reader was originally published in the 18th and 19th centuries, so I'm able to get them in various places legally for free. I actually have about $50 worth of ebooks (about 4 books) sitting in my shopping cart at Books on Board, but haven't pulled the trigger as I know I don't have time to read them right now--piled up with research for WIP and books I have to review for my blog and read for my book club. However, I've paid as much as $20 for an ebook I really wanted to read. I am at the point that I prefer ebooks for most of my reading because I live in a small space and my storage space is finite.