I don't own a Kindle and don't foresee owning one in the near future. However, the notion that an e-book should be priced anywhere close to a dead-tree version is ridiculous. The publisher's production and distribution costs for an e-book are virtually zero. Yes, the publisher needs to recoup marketing costs and pay the editor's salary, and of course the author needs to be paid, but most authors only make about 15% of the hardcover list price, and most titles get almost no marketing support from their publishers. If a publisher can turn a profit on a $25 hardcover that it wholesales for $12.50, and $3.75 of that goes to the author, how much of the remaining $8.75 goes for printing, binding, warehousing, and shipping? My guess is, at least half. That means currently, publishers feel they can earn back their marketing and editing costs and make a profit if they take $4.50 from each sale. $4.50 (publisher) + $3.75 (author) = $8.25. Amazon sells at $10, that's $1.75 profit for Amazon for something that costs them very little to store and distribute, not counting the profit they make off of each Kindle sold.

Publishers need to either spurn e-books entirely or price them rationally, and if the latter, people will either pay a premium for dead trees, or buy Kindles.

You open a great Pandora's Box here. One can look at any product and question what profit margin is justifiable and - importantly - what should the standards for justification be. When you said "... price them rationally ... ", what standard did you have in mind?

I'm simply noting that for $8.25 they can make the same profit on an e-book as they do from a $25 hardcover. Why should they demand many times the profit margin for the same product in a different -- and for them, cheaper and less risky -- form? There are no remaindered e-books.

Publishers who move in lockstep on this raise the spectre of price-fixing; otherwise some publishers would attempt to buy market share by moving to rationally priced e-books that afford them the same profits as hardcovers.