>I've always assumed that e-books are expensive because their buyers are known to be affluent. That's probably part of it, yeah. Maybe we'll see that eroding

>I've always assumed that e-books are expensive because their buyers are known to be affluent. That's probably part of it, yeah. Maybe we'll see that eroding with the spread of smartphones. The problem there is that generating multiple versions of the ebook throws away some of the economic appeal. The segmentation between hardcovers and paperbacks is natural in the format: once the hardcovers sell out, and nobody's willing to pay hardcover prices any more, you need to make a cheaper edition, so you make paperbacks, which require you to spend effort on laying out the book again. With ebooks, once you generate the initial edition, there's no inherent need to invest in the book ever again. Once it stops selling at $20, you just cut the price. To yield segmentation like this, there'd have to be a strong economic incentive, or else a cheap way of generating the multiple editions. Maybe if the high-end version had pictures, and the low-end version didn't; then you could build them both from the same source file.