<i>I'm curious why people think e-books should be so cheap?</i><p>Many years of rhetoric about other industries' transitions from atoms to bits have left many with the mistaken impression that the price should gravitate toward the cost of moving and storing the bits rather than the value in their particular arrangement.<p>The peak of this way of thinking was AllOfMP3, that dubiously legal Russian site that used to sell music by the megabyte. There were people who actually considered that <i>fair and reasonable</i>. Fortunately we're all a little more used to the idea of paying for bits these days, but the tendency to under-estimate their worth is persistent.