When would you read all your books if you bought ten times as many? I think that's a hard limitation of the book market - even devoted readers can only read so much.

I don't read all of the books I get already. Some I read cover to cover, others I read portions of, use for reference, or just pick out a few key ideas. Other times I change to another topic for a while before I get to the book, and end up reading it years later. I'm not just feeding my short-term reading, I'm building a library.

Also, I specified an open, non-DRM format because that way I could apply software to the problem: text summarization tools, staged memory training, and/or just copying sections out manually into summary documents.

>If I could buy ebooks at 1/10 the price, in an open DRM-free format, I would buy ten times as many books.

So if they would drop their prices to 1/10th you wouldn't spend a penny more but you'd have more books? It's obvious how this is good for you, but how is that an advantage to them? They're trying to make money, not populate the world with books.

Further, you have a finite list of books you want. Even though it's growing it's not growing at the speed of light. If they let you get everything on your list for the 1/10th the price then they soon won't have anything else to sell you. Where are they going to recoup the money they lost buy letting you have 10 times the assets for the same cost?

As others have posted, most of the publisher's cost is a fixed up-front cost. The marginal cost of publishing is relatively minor. For ebooks it's almost nonexistent. So if they were to reduce their price, I would get a lot more books, while contributing just as much to the publishers' fixed costs. Since I'm always adding new things to my wishlist, and purchasing about ten percent of the new additions, it's unlikely that they'll run out of things to sell me.

What's more, chances are good that I'd spend more money. Aside from the expense, what keeps me from buying more books is the sheer physical space they occupy. If I could get electronic versions of them all, in formats that let me back them up, copy excerpts from them, etc., then that would cease to be an issue. But a restrictive DRM-encumbered file gives me less utility than a paper book, so I've been unwilling to spend as much money for it.

>I would get a lot more books, while contributing just as much to the publishers' fixed costs.

Gain for you, no gain for them.

>it's unlikely that they'll run out of things to sell me.

I find this hard to believe. Currently it sounds like you spend up to your max periodically. If every buying cycle you were able to completely empty your list, it's hard to imagine that there would never be a time that that list wouldn't be less then your max budgeted about, as it is now.

>What's more, chances are good that I'd spend more money.

No they're not. You've already explained that you're already spending all that you're comfortable spending. There is virtually no chance that you'd spend more. As I explained, it's much more likely you'd spend less.

>But a restrictive DRM-encumbered file gives me less utility than a paper book, so I've been unwilling to spend as much money for it.

What do you want to do that you can't? It will sync to at least 3 devices (I only have 3 applicable devices, so I don't know if I could push it to more). You can't loan it to people, that's true. You also can't copy it around as a file, but I don't see how that's a meaningful restriction.

The other constraint is the physical space. If I didn't have to worry about that, I'd increase my budget. I can afford to spend more, but with books spilling everywhere in my apartment already I try to keep things within reason.

Unless I break the DRM, I'm tied to the vendor. I have no guarantee that I'll still be able to read the book in 20 years, or read my margin notes. If I'm less fond of the book, I can't sell it when I'm done with it, or give it to a library.

Finally, I think the public benefit of getting more books in more people's hands shouldn't be discounted, given that the Constitution says the whole purpose of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."