Hmm. I agree that that price is in many cases too high. But as you say, that's because ebooks are non-transferable. Is creating and selling the devices and marketplace that make those ebooks non-transferable also on the consumer's side?

Amazon could have adopted EPUB for the Kindle instead of making their own ebook formats, and they could have pushed for higher-priced-but-transferable ebooks without DRM. They haven't done either at any point. It looks to me like Amazon is only on the consumer's side when they can strongarm the consumer into spending more money at Amazon.

Amazon isn't just encouraging lower ebook pricing, they are actively penalising authors that try to sell books above this level. Try to sell something over that price and the revenue split flips to 70/30 in their favour! They are removing the choice.

To have such a huge retailer force authors into such a cheap price bracket really devalues the content and sets consumer expectations.