Ebooks and print books have different markets. Ergo, we should expect pricing to be correlated, but different. Consider: The economics of producing a hardcover

Ebooks and print books have different markets. Ergo, we should expect pricing to be correlated, but different. Consider: The economics of producing a hardcover book and a trade paperback are not as different as their prices suggest. The hardcover costs a bit more to print, but not significantly much more, because most of the cost of producing a book is in the writing and editing and marketing. The difference between hardcover and paperback is an artificial marketing distinction: Hardcovers seem more substantial, and (more importantly) they come out earlier, so they sell to the people with more money than patience and with a taste in bookbinding. They are therefore priced higher to take advantage of those folks' willingness to pay. I suspect that so long as e-readers cost hundreds of dollars (and, more importantly, e-books have DRM and can't be borrowed or resold) they will naturally tend to be priced like hardcovers, or worse.