ebooks must (and will) fall in price

Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over E-book Price Disagreement
Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise to the price of e-books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the state of negotiations.

$9.99 is still too expensive.

$15.00 is absurd.

I know somewhat the cost of books and authors/publishers can do very nicely with much lower prices of ebooks. (Printers and booksellers will, if they even exist, get hammered.)

They'll sell far more copies with total gross sales if they cut the prices to $5-6 for a late edition.

Of course I understand that publishers are feeling their way and are scared to change things too radically. But prices for ebooks will come down -- they don't need the margins. While books are hardly fungible, many titles do have some degree of similarity and can be replaced and are competitive. That's primarily with non-fiction but fiction as well. In fact it's almost possible to say that the vast backlist of detective stories is almost a commodity item. Dirty little secret but true.