Yes, they're charging the price that they can get away with. But they can only get away with it because it's an anticompetitive industry. Publishing house X sho

Yes, they're charging the price that they can get away with. But they can only get away with it because it's an anticompetitive industry. Publishing house X should see the inflated price of ebooks as a revenue opportunity - undercut everyone else by charging less of a markup, and they would probably get a much larger chunk of the market to make up for it. My guess why this isn't happening is because Publishing house X shares half its board of directors with Publishing house Y, and they have some sort of (probably implicit, since probably illegal) agreement to do whatever is necessary to keep a lock on the industry, by restricting access through new digital channels. See also: the music industry, the film industry, the television industry.