The general perception of the marginal cost of a vendor of stocking and selling the good, as compared with the price they ask you and the value-added service they offer. With digital goods, the marginal cost of delivering you a copy is pretty much zero. As for service provided - it depends, but most of the time, the service itself doesn't seem to be costing much more than "pretty much nothing".
What matters is perception. To use Amazon Kindle Store as an example - the primary service they (and most on-line merchants) offer you is... a payment gateway. It doesn't seem expensive. They also host the ebooks, but again - downloading digital goods is free at the margin. You could say that e-book prices also subsidize Kindle R&D and/or manufacturing (not sure if that's true, but assuming it for the sake of an example) - but at this point I have to ask, why should I care?
Businesses like to move around costs and profits and do anything but transparent pricing in order to maximize profits. Koerig sells you coffee machines at a loss for price X, and then tries to make it up with DRMed, overpriced coffee pods. I feel it's unfair because - why should I care about the coffee pods subsidizing my coffee maker? They didn't tell me up-front they're doing it, they just sell me a coffee maker for X.
Similarly with ebooks. The marignal costs to the retailer are zero, so the price should be low too - if they're subsidizing something with ebook sales, that's not my problem. I'll call expensive ebooks unfairly priced. If they want me to think the price is fair, they need to work on my perception of their cost structures, instead of obfuscating everything.
What matters is perception. To use Amazon Kindle Store as an example - the primary service they (and most on-line merchants) offer you is... a payment gateway. It doesn't seem expensive. They also host the ebooks, but again - downloading digital goods is free at the margin. You could say that e-book prices also subsidize Kindle R&D and/or manufacturing (not sure if that's true, but assuming it for the sake of an example) - but at this point I have to ask, why should I care?
Businesses like to move around costs and profits and do anything but transparent pricing in order to maximize profits. Koerig sells you coffee machines at a loss for price X, and then tries to make it up with DRMed, overpriced coffee pods. I feel it's unfair because - why should I care about the coffee pods subsidizing my coffee maker? They didn't tell me up-front they're doing it, they just sell me a coffee maker for X.
Similarly with ebooks. The marignal costs to the retailer are zero, so the price should be low too - if they're subsidizing something with ebook sales, that's not my problem. I'll call expensive ebooks unfairly priced. If they want me to think the price is fair, they need to work on my perception of their cost structures, instead of obfuscating everything.