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She's over reached a couple times and shot themselves in the foot, but Lina Khan is a boss.

Fucking Factorio engineers everywhere, I swear.

This is unfortunately true... Tho what is driving the rent seeking isnt tech debt its greed

The expensive part of making books is not the paper. My wife is an independent author and between editing, typesetting, cover design, etc. she spent about $1500 to publish each of her books.

While she could price her books at $1, that would present her with a few problems.

Firstly, people often value things based on what they've paid for them, so pricing your book too low makes people assume it is of poor quality.

Secondly, having positive reviews is extremely important for indie authors because the Almighty Algorithm will reward you or punish you based on the book's rating. Other indie authors she has talked to have seen a noticable decline in their book's rating after Amazon put it on sale and a bunch of people who might not have otherwise read it started buying copies. If you've ever worked retail or food service, you probably know that bargain hunters are often the people who are least reasonable and hardest to please. If the book is too cheap, you may attract an audience that harms its reputation.

Finally, trying to sell 2000+ copies of a book is pretty daunting for small authors and that's about what it would take to break even at $1 per copy.

Could big publishers and well known authors sell books for a buck? Probably. But for the majority of authors who aren't making their living by writing and only sell a few hundred copies ever, that's not really realistic.

No, they cost more because of Steve Jobs.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/how-apple-led-an-e-book-price-conspiracy-in-the-judges-words/

This is your reminder that that man was utter trash.

... Why would you rent a way heater, in a home you own? Is the house a school or something???

No, it's monopoly capitalism. A certain Mr. Marx from Germany had a few things to say about it.

Enshittification has nothing to do with pricing.

It's about market capture and the resulting lack of choices allowing market holders to maximize profits by degrading product performance. This can occur even when the product has no price.

We are more efficient. In my work computer automation has saved the equivalent to five thousand workers

Those five thousand workers don't get to work a fraction of a day for the same pay, the saving is made a level or five above the workers

Some of our savings are hidden by inflation, but many products are far cheaper now

Absolutely they do, which is why the competition could not compete. Once the whole market is dominated by a few companies, it lets them get a little more creative with how they price things, and a little lazier with their coding practices.

Price = Cost of Materials + (Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man) + Cost of Labor.

It's Econ 101

Yeah companies need to stop being allowed to be multiple industries.

Like why does every department store have a credit card now? They should be using their profits to pay their employees, not loaning it out at insane interest rates.

~ Gabe Newell