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Ebook pricing is interesting topic and iritating as well.
For example here in Poland, there is like a few percent difference between a paper book and ebook cost. It is all about taxes, which in Poland are really harsh. And people who get used to paper books - it is obvious what would they choose.
And even because ebook "production" costs are way lower than printing a book, you can't see it because of the prices.
I heard that the situation should be better soon but I hear it since two, three years already. And there's nothing going on except talking and talking about it.
The worst thing is that ebook is considered as a service, not a product. Except when you buy ebook on a CD for example, then it is considered as a product and tax value is 12% different (polish example). But hey - it is unluckily still not that much. Because we are still talking about tax cost difference, not 12% of the whole ebook price. Ridiculous.
As I run a blog about electronic way of reading, I see that a lot of people are sceptical to pay for something they can download for free or have it in a paper version. They still keep a distance to buy something that they can't touch.
Somehow, the most popular way people are buying ebooks here are discounts, which can be really huge and you have a possibility to buy a few ebooks in a bundles which you mentioned. We have a polish portal that works like a comparision site which alerts you via e-mail when there is a discount on ebook that you are interested about. On a bigger bookstore events you can get your ebook for even 90% (!) less price (example of a last holiday event of one of polish bookstores - "Napoleon the Great" by Andrew Roberts which is a huge and expensive book was about 90% cheaper).
Going back on taxes topic - I heard that France and Germany made a revolutional change of pricing and made the taxes for ebooks way smaller. But then EU came up with anger that it conflicts the constitution and rules and I heard that it doesn't work the way they managed anymore... That doesn't help as well...
Content? I don't think so. Unless it is for example a historical, huge book which costs in normal way a lot (again the closest "Napoleon the Great" by Andrew Roberts example), the difference in ebook price is much more seen than in case of a 'common' popular (f.e. fantasy, thriller) book/ebook which costs - let's say - a half of it in the beginning.
I don't say that ebooks should be close to be free-to-download. I just say that if you would see for example up to 50% difference between paper version and ebook version, people would be much more interested in convincing themselves to read ebooks. And what comes after - a scale of a piracy would be way lower.
And it wouldn't harm the paper books sale for sure. Because if someone like to have impressive library - they will buy paper books anyway.
Because no matter how - reading counts in every way.
But let's be fair and don't pay for something you can avoid.
And the most important: Less price = higher sales, doesn't it work like that?
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