Overall a good read. The cast of characters get “Russian novelesque” toward the middle though. There is a great chapter on the boy bands (Back Street Boys et al)

A tenant of capitalism is that the market determines a fair price, and a fair price is whatever the market will bear. As we speak, publishers are trying to see what we will bear. Just how much is that ebook worth to us? If they can get all of us to decide that the ebook is extremely valuable, and perhaps even more useful than a paper book — regardless of what we know the production costs are, then they will have been able to move the market’s judgement of a “fair price” in their favor.
Time and time again however, it has been seen in other markets that consumers do make a judgement of fairness. Generally, consumers do expect that producers have a right to make a profit, but they expect that profit to have some reasonable relationship to the expense of production. For the publishers, negotiation consists of throwing something up there and seeing what flies with the public.
All of the moaning about not being able to make a sustainable profit is just misdirection and posturing to support their attempt to move prices higher.
All of the above seems fair to me, but what I really resent is when publishers, and the media in general, attempt to use governments to change laws allowing then to gain an unfair advantage in this pricing tug-of-war.