I might be ok with this for certain books if ebooks were substantially cheaper. Currently even for books I don't want to keep
it's cheaper to buy the book, read it, and resell it on amazon. If a $20 paper book gives the author $7 of royalties then at
a maximum an ebook should be priced at about $7.50 but because you can't turn around and resell that ebook it should
probably be priced closer to $3 or less. If ebooks actually started being priced at a rental price then it would make alot more
sense to buy ebooks. I still prefer paper books and most of the times the paperback and used copies are cheaper than
the ebooks even before you include resell value and alot of that goes to shipping. I would love to see 30 day rental fees for
ebooks be priced at or below the paperback/used book price instead of ebooks being priced at 70% of the hardback price.
It makes no sense that I can get a NEW physical paperback book SHIPPED to me cheaper than I can buy the electronic version.
What makes you think a traditional author deserves that much money off an ebook? Neverminding the 30% cut Amazon takes in self-publishing?
In the traditional print model (the one most authors do with publishers), the ONLY THING the author delivers the publisher is a block of text. That's all they're contracted to provide.
From there, a gaggle of other people work to transform that block of text into a book. Someone needs to do the cover art, another needs to go through and at least try to fix the most egregious errors (this back-and-forth with the author takes the longest as the editor will catch an error, and they need to confirm with the author that it's really an error and not deliberate), then revise, edit, consult, etc. Once that's done, Other things is that the publisher needs ISBNs, someone to do a table of contents, an index (if necessary), rework illustrations (with the illustrator - or the author because they have no qualms about submitting a 160x160 pixel image for a full page illustration) as well as securing rights to use third party images (photos, illustrations, etc) that the author may have included. And all the other stuff in a book including author bio and other front and back matter.
And then, someone has to go and take that final work, and lay it out on the page (real or electronic) - ensuring graphics, text, photos, etc are all properly laid out together, scaled properly, and that it looks good - that dark image you included may end up as a black square on e-readers, for example as they have a limited palette. And make sure chapter headings and all that other stuff are properly inserted, and linked and everything is in its place.
And somehow, you think the author who gets $7 out of a $30 book deserves to get it all when the ebook is priced $7.50? After Amazon's cut, that's $5 and the author would probably get $3 tops because those other guys behind the work don't work for free.
In fact, the editing process is such that the cost of printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution is really only around 10% of the retail cost.
So of a $30 hardcover, the publisher gets $20. And they probably need to price it at $27 to make up for the 30% cut at the electronic store (Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, whatever, and 30% is on the LOW side! Amazon "makes deals" at 30%, showing their real take is often far higher (30% being forced by Apple's flat-rate plan)).
Maybe $25 to make it a nice number since there's $3 in savings due to not having to actually print/ship/distribute/warehouse/handle returns.