It's nice that this came up, since I'll be doing research on it for school for the next 3 terms. It seems that there are several reasons for slow change:<p>* What do you do with all the middlemen (publisher's work, logistics) that are made redundant? Fire them?<p>* There is a theory saying that people perceive e-books to have lower value than printed ones because it's not touchable / feelable (I don't agree with this)<p>* Authors like to have everything else (proofreading and publicity are two major ones) taken care of by their publishers.<p>* Publishers are also a mark of status, like scientific journals. Getting a deal with, say, Oreilly automatically sets the author apart.<p>* Students are pretty much locked in to the books that their instructors choose and so textbook publishers take advantage of this fixed audience that is guaranteed to buy the books no matter what. Making it cheaper would be a loss to them.<p>There are many others I can't think of off the top of my head but this seems to be the gist of it.