I agree with Forrest that it would be great if it were possible to borrow digital books.
Something similar to Safari Books but for a larger body of work:
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/
Also I wonder sometimes about the traditional publishing model. The idea is that a person (let's say Stephen King) spends x numbers of hours writing a book. He gets advances from the publisher but ultimately he's getting paid when the book is released, and his proceeds depend on his sales.
Stephen King doesn't advocate a political point of view but his focus is mostly to entertain.
But there may be many instances today where people care less about how many sales they make, and more about how persuasive their ideas are.
http://www.amazon.com/Sam-Walton-Made-America/dp/0553562835
Walton obviously did not need the money – but he wrote the book to talk about the company and the business that he devoted so much time to and loved.
http://www.amazon.com/Wal-Mart-Way-Success-Largest-Company/dp/0785261192
Similarly I don't think Soderquist needed the money – but he wanted to try to preserve Walmart culture.
http://www.amazon.com/What-Angel-Taught-You-Fulfillment/dp/1578191343/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265052065&sr=1-1
Rabbi Noah Weinberg probably cared more about how many people he could bring to Orthodox Judaism then how many sales of his book there were. The more books that he sold the more potential people he could bring back to Orthodoxy but he goal was religious not financial.
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265052149&sr=1-
Taleb has plenty of money. He wants to sell books, but I think he would rather see change in behavior than greater book sales.
http://www.amazon.com/Misbehavior-Markets-Fractal-Financial-Turbulence/dp/0465043577/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265052199&sr=1-
1-spell
I don't think Benoit Mandlebrot wrote the book to get rich. In fact I think he said in the preface that there are only a handful of people (at a central bank in Europe) who make decisions which affect hundreds of millions. He hoped to influence those people, and to help create scientific dialog.
http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265053001&sr=1-1 –
Dambisa Moyo is advocating a change in policy with respect to aid for Africa. She very well may care more about whether her book causes policy changes then whether she makes profit from it (I believe she worked at a high position in an investment brokerage firm).
So I think in these examples the people wrote the book (perhaps in part to make money), but also to persuade people of a certain point of view, or to change their behavior – what they do and how they see the world.
They could offer the books for free and they would probably get a larger audience (David Roodman is offering a book on microfinance for free)
http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book/category/about-the-bookoutline
but on the other hand even if they get a larger audience that additional audience may or may not contribute to a productive dialog.
The reasoning may be that if somebody is going to devote their time to listen to the argument, they are probably willing to fork over the $15 or $20 to hear it.
On another topic, I don't know for sure but I'd conjecture that a great deal of the cost of books today is the advertising.
When I was a graduate school I heard a talk by Eric Brill of Microsoft and he said the most expensive commodity in computing today is human attention.
People, books, websites, etc. are competing for human attention. I'm reading a book by Alan Greenspan called The Age of Turbulence. He says that coffee makers compete with soda and beer. They are competing for their share of the human stomach.
With this new iPad device maybe people will consider a model where the book is initially more expensive, is then cheaper, and is then zero (free, in the public domain).