[msluyter]

Not sure if this is a complete explanation, but people tend to ascribe more value to physical objects and perhaps, because the general price of books is bounded within a known range that is fairly stable, don’t question the price as hard as they might. That is, if a book is roughly the same price of other books in the category you’ll tend to view the price as “fair.”

The value of a podcast seems more nebulous to me, and perhaps this raises more questions. Unless you already subscribe to a lot of podcasts you may not have the equivalent comparison point, so more questions arise.

On top of that, subscriptions create another barrier to entry and raise even more questions.