The Law of Computer Entropy
Roger Sperberg talks about why computers and software (and anything that uses computers or software) gets cheaper over time. He then applies this thinking to alternate pricing strategies for the publishing industry:

Publishers are only vaguely aware that their purchasers’ expectation of their product is about to switch from the Colgate-Palmolive type to the mp3 type, the type wherein additional features means more of the product. They have been blinded by the download side effect — My god, they can steal our books! We’re doomed! — as though all these people are going to start selling the books on street corners. They haven’t looked at the cause. But they’d better get ready to give these people, their customers, more, somehow.

Publishers could deal with this shift in expectations in any number of ways. They could act like Disneyland or a pay library: Pay once, go on any ride — er, read any book — free all day (all week/month/year). Or let libraries be libraries and meter their readers’ access to books: Up to ten thousand reads of Half-Blood Prince before renewing your license. (Next year, the price stays the same and the library gets eleven thousand reads.) Or use the bonus approach: Buy this book — and get your choice of these additional backlist books free. A publisher like Bantam churns through so many hundred books a year they wouldn’t really lose any money with a deal like this, if they picked the right titles. And of course they’d end up building the audience for those free-book authors.