Eli5: Why is the purchase price of e-books basically the same as print.

Question

I would expect e-books to be considerably cheaper than printed books, since there are reduced distribution and production costs. Yet the retail price often doesn’t match those savings versus an e-book. I would hope that the authors royalties would reflect some of the savings in production costs.

In: Economics

Answer 1

While not the main reason, one of the reasons may be is because they also force people to things like ebook sharing programs; which also returns as revenue to the authors by the per read page.

If the prices of all ebooks are, say, $1-$5, no one would be interested in those sharing programs. However; they know that their own audience will most likely buy the ebooks to keep them even for the same price, and increase the number of audience by sharing programs rather than decreasing the ebook prices.