I agree wholeheartedly with the first main point that you raise. I’ve written extensively here about my misgivings about the Kindle, and indeed I hope I didn’t give the impression in this particular post that I’m a fan of Amazon or its tactics in trying to lock up the ebook market. (Hence, the health care analogy.)

I’m less sure about the second point. My argument in this post concerns lower price possibly leading to higher sales volume, which, would not, perforce, entail a break from the type of subsidy system you’re describing. But then again, perhaps I put too much faith in “long tail” economics. I gather the emerging research isn’t entirely bearing out Anderson’s hypothesis, but we’ll see.

Thanks very much for the thoughtful comment. And for whatever it’s worth, I’d hardly describe your books as “unpopular!”

There are two big issues here you left out:

1) The potential of Amazon to lock up the ebooks standard and market and control books via devices that it alone can sell.

2) The need that publishers have to let windfalls on popular books make up for losses on unpopular (i.e. your and my) books.

As the music business has learned so painfully, once you create a standard price expectation, you can’t let hits pay for dogs. And more specific to the publishing world, big, expensive-to-edit books that don’t expect 10k sales will disappear forever if they can’t charge enough to recoup costs of production.

So it’s not “greed.” It’s business.