What I'd like to see tried is to debut ebooks at $20. Then, every month, depreciate them by 5%, down to a floor of $5 or thereabouts. (Maybe even lower.) Unfor

What I'd like to see tried is to debut ebooks at $20. Then, every month, depreciate them by 5%, down to a floor of $5 or thereabouts. (Maybe even lower.) Unfortunately for a publisher to try this would require (a) all new contractual boilerplate (which will be a whole barrel of laughs as they try to get the authors and their agents to accept it) and (b) new accounting procedures to calculate royalties based not on the net volume of sales but on the time from publication date of those sales. And even then, this is only going to work out if customers are willing to wait until the book meets their criteria for affordability rather than going in search of a pirate copy of the text.