Everything is changing so fast in the world of books.
I noticed that as soon as ereaders started to gain some popularity the price of ebooks skyrocketed. The one thing that always appealed to me about ebooks was the lower price. Other than that, I'd rather have a hard copy any day of the week! The only benefit I ever saw to having an ecopy was the cheaper price. I got a kindle fire, got all excited to go download some new titles from my favorite authors and saw the pricetags. About dropped my drawers. And frankly, it wasn't Amazon that was jacking up those prices, it was big publishers.
I personally think there is a lot wrong with the ebook industry at the moment. I also think its to be expected to a degree. This is newly discovered territory. It will be interesting to see how this all pans out.
NOW...im gonna follow that link and go check out that article. Thanks for posting it!
Here's what happened. Ebooks used to be sold on the reseller model - I sell Amazon an ebook for £2.50, they resell it to the public for £5.00.
Amazon then wanted market share for Kindle, so they started cutting the prices of ebooks. They'd sell them for, say, £2.00, deciding to take a loss on each sale in order to corner the ereader market. The low-cost books were selling the hardware.
Publishers then said, hang on, we'd prefer that everyone didn't get used to buying ebooks for less than the cost of actually making them. So they moved over to the agency model - where the publisher gets to set the price. That's where your 'skyrocket' is coming from.
Broadly speaking, if the ebook price is set by the publisher it's pegged to the print price. But because Amazon is a reseller of print books, and can choose what they sell them at, they like to cut the price of the print book to lower than the ebook, purely in order to make the publisher look bad.
