What price books?

Megan hails Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle* and makes a pretty persuasive case. But what happens when you lose or break your Kindle? Does that mean you’ve lost your library too? James Joyner is not quite so convinced and complains:

And the fact that e-books are still priced at 50-80 percent the sticker price of the hardcover books strikes me as outrageous, given that the cost of materials, production, transport, and so forth have gone away and one doesn’t end up with a nice objet d’art for one’s shelves.

Not so fast! Authors have to get paid too! Now if every book were sold electronically I doubt you would see much of a price drop for consumers – at least not in the case of still-in-print and copyright material. e-books should, theoretically, be excellent for out-of-copyright classics since these books can be sold for, well, practically nothing (or even given away) while costing no more to carry around than, well, any other book.