Highway robbery is it?

In the category of more dumb review stuff are those [like this "reviewer"] that believe scholarship should be valued using a completely arbitrary hierarchy of media packaging. Mobile apps have the same warped perceptions to overcome. It's bad enough in the mature market PC software realm that digital download prices remain substantial after leaving printed manuals, boxes and CDs behind but outfits actually have to the gall to charge the "premium" price of $1.99 for phone and tablet apps that took teams years to create! At least books aren't expected to be free yet.

With the company's high profile battles with publishers over setting e-book prices below $10 across the board regardless of market circumstances, The River is partly to blame for shaping thoughtless consumer expectations, but given America's decades-long shift toward a service economy one would think at this point there would be a more broadly savvy appreciation of what might go into the value creation of non-physical goods. The amount of resources publishers invest in proper e-book conversions certainly must be non-trivial (and the process difficult, given the tremendous amount of scathing e-book reviews I continue to encounter online) but they could probably do a better job of educating consumers. Whether anyone would listen is another matter.