title_body: Is there a fair price for an ebook? What is the cost of an ebook? What criteria should I use to decide a
  fair price when the price is left up to me. How can I be fair to the
  seller and to myself?
  
  Several sites offers ebooks, often as bundles, at a low price, or at a
  price to be chosen by the buyer, usually above a minimum threshold.
  Examples I have seen include Humble Bundle and similar sites, or
  Phoenix Pick.  Phoenix Pick also sells individual books, many of which
  are classic (more or less old), but seems to be mostly established
  authors, with significant price variations.
  
  Then you have sites like Smashwords, more oriented towards indies
  (independent authors) who self publish. These are usually recent
  books, with little quality filtering (but is there much with some
  other publishers). Some books are free, others vary significantly in
  price, and prices vary in time. Here again, some books  are sold for
  the price the buyer will give.
  
  Thus I often wonder how much I should pay for an ebook, which is fair
  to the seller and to myself. (The problem is compounded in the case of
  bundles with the fact that one may be interested in only some books of
  the bundle.)
  
  Hence I wonder what is the cost of an ebook, independently of the
  content value, which is the subjective part.
  
  AFAIK, and I did look into some actual figures, most of the price of a
  paper book goes into its more material aspects. More than 50% is due
  to printing, storing, transportation, bookstore costs, not to mention
  the destruction of unsold copies. Hence, the cost of an ebook should
  not exceed half the paperback cost, without penalizing the author or
  the publisher. This does not seem to fit what I observe.
  
  There is the cost of digital formating, but from looking at the ebooks
  available at the Internet Archive, it seem that many have been epub
  formatted mechanically. The result does leave much room for
  improvement, but it shows that digital formatting remains a quite
  tractable task.
  
  Then, I am aware that contents matter. But still, what should be
  considered a reasonable payment for, say, the equivalent of 300 pages in
  paperback.
  
  To give a bundle example, Humble Bundle asked for a minimum of $15 for a
  rather good selection of 20 books, while Phoenix Pick asks a minimum
  of $7 for a selection of 4 books, a lower limit in both cases.
upvoted_answer: Since some users want to close this question as off-topic or opinion
  based, I decided to give my own tentative answer, based on my own
  thinking since I asked the question, and influenced by some of the comments.
  
  I am well aware of cost issues in publishing, but I have little
  experience as a customer where e-books are concerned. Having to fix my
  own price as an e-book customer is a new experience to me, and I was
  wondering how it is perceived and analyzed by other e-books customers
  and sellers. This type of pricing is not usual where paper books are
  concerned.
  
  Is this off-topic on this site? I believe not. The topic page states:
  
  
    The main focus is on the processes involved in publishing and/or
      consuming ebooks (and related tools), rather than on the content of
      ebooks.
  
  
  Though this does not explicitly include economic aspects, it does not
  rule them out. A question such as pros and cons of  publishing in XYZ
  format can typically have economic answers.
  
  What is explicitly ruled out is questions about specific books or
  sites, or discussing specific ebooks or ereader retailers, when it can
  be shopping or opinion based, which does not rule out technical
  questions.
  
  My question is about pricing in the general sense, not specific items,
  and it is an issue that is seriously analyzed by professionals and
  economists. It is a technical and scientific issue.
  
  Many documents do address this issue, for both traditional paper books
  and more recently for ebooks.
  
  It is true that many statements are opinion based, because all kinds
  of people have an opinion to voice, with or without competence to
  justify it (see Consumers Upset and Confused Over E-Book Pricing). Some people have also an interest in keeping this fuzzy,
  so that their market is not understood or analyzed too closely,  especially by authors and consumers.
  
  My own usual references on books cost are not in English.
  However, I was  able to find rather quickly some new ones on the web,
  such as
  Book Cost Analysis – Cost of Physical Book Publishing
  which does itself use several external references.
  
  This article agrees that about 50% of the printed book cost comes
  from distribution (10%) and retail (40%), to which one can add around
  10% of printing costs. This is reduced to nearly nothing in the case
  of e-books.
  
  Clearly, ebooks have their own costs, but they are very unlikely to be
  comparable to what is being saved (some more than 50%) on the material
  aspects of printed books.
  
  What is more likely is that market behavior changes significantly, because eproducts have no marginal cost
  (it costs nearly nothing to make extra copies).
  That is to be taken into account by both the producers and the
  consumers of ebooks. One aspect of it is that the market is a lot more
  competitive as more authors can enter it (I am currently reading a
  very nice ebook that is available only for free).
  
  Another consequence is that some sellers consider that letting the
  customer fix his own price, possibly within limits, is a good way to
  do business. Why do they do this? Fixing my own price as a customer,
  in a way that is fair, also depends on my understanding of the
  economics and of the economic analysis of the seller. There can be, as
  always opinion based assessments of it: some people still have strange
  opinions about well established scientific facts. But this is clearly
  a matter for scientific and technical analysis.
  
  The major point is that paper books both have fixed costs, independent
  of the number of books sold, and marginal costs for each (additional)
  book. They also have a high investment cost in the printing, since it
  must be done in large numbers to be economically acceptable.
  
  The ebooks business has a lesser up-front investment, because no mass
  printing is needed, and no marginal costs (the more than 50% in
  printing, distribution and retail. Once the book exist in epub, mobi,
  or whaterver, it is essentially free for the publisher (except for
  advertising possibly, but that is done only when return is expected).
  
  What matters to the publisher is not the number of books sold, but the total
  income it brings. Any addtional dollar is worth taking, since what is
  given in exchange no longer costs anything.
  
  That is probably the motivations for open pricing and bundle pricing.
  
  Then, I would think that what matters for the producers of ebooks is
  not to get a given price for a book or a bundle, but how much of my
  money I will input in the book production system every month. Giving
  me additional books, that I will probably not read all, cost them
  nothing and may increase my inclination to buy.
  
  So my conclusion is that there is no real fair price for each
  individual buy. Rather one should spend monthly a global amount
  proportional to one's means and one's amount of reading.
  
  The role of the seller is to induce a consumer behavior that will
  maximize the total income, rather than the profit per book sold.
  One role of the consumer is to make sure the producers can make a
  living (and keep producing), which does imply a level of spending, but
  not necessarily a high cost per book.
  
  This analysis may not be totally accurate, but it is fairly precise (in a qualitative way) and
  can be disputed on objective facts and arguments, rather than opinions.