Bah!
I'd have more sympathy for the poor publisher and author if I didn't see the e-book pricing on new fiction brushing the lower stratosphere while a hardback was the only option, and if I hadn't watched it so often change when the paperback version was published (for exactly the same product, remember).
And with apologies to Mr Stross whom I've met, heard read and whose works have formed a good part of my reading, no e-book is worth more than about six bucks unless it pushes Dhalgren/Dune levels of content.
It is purely ludicrous that I can get a current paperback version of a book that took energy and time to make, has artwork and physical materials, and requires physical delivery and storage *cheaper* than the e-version of that same book in which only one of those things is true.
Hell, often I can get a remaindered hardback at half the price people are asking for e-versions sometimes, though I don't like hardbacks for my reading habit because they are too big to be carried on my commute easily. I buy hardbacks when authors are in town so I can have them signed, both as a collecting thing and as a giving back to the author thing. I like paperbacks, and not those hardback-sized whitespace fests the publishers like because they are bigger on the shelves, I mean proper paperbacks that are now derided as "mass market" paperbacks.
Which in turn have started to get taller because publishers think we notice books on a shelf by their size, not by content, word of mouth or previous author experience which I know to be the drivers in my circle of reading friends. So much for my custom-built shelving, sized for the paperback as in print for most of my life and now too small. Oh well.
E-books as they stand are visibly not value for money. From the latest Game of Thrones episode to Starship Troopers, a book written fifty years ago by an author long dead, they are obviously and painfully overpriced. My reluctance to buy them even though I have a Kindle and would lap 'em up under other circumstances is not my problem, but the publishers and ultimately the authors' who have unrealistic expectations of what their product is worth.
And that goes in spades for optical scans of older works which have had no proof reading of the OCR and have had no correction to the markup. I am sick to the back teeth of getting an e-book for which I've paid over the odds in which the text is mangled or misaligned or refers to figures that simply are not there.
I won't even talk about the worth of DRM.