The Future Of Ebook Pricing--Necessarily A Downward Trend?

This http://makerightpub.com post asks one of the eternal ebook questions: what is the right price for an ebook?  Is there ever one such price to begin with?  Amazon's rock bottom $0.99 seemed like the answer, until authors sought ways to make their books free.

The poster mentions, "The problem right now is there are tons of eBooks on Amazon for just 99-cents and many are great and more are junk."  Numerous threads, both on absolutewrite.com and at the Kindle Boards, have given different perspectives on these very points.  The conventional answer is usually that price is but one marketing tool and must be considered along with the rest of the package, whether genre, cover, blurb, or press releases.  There is no one answer for each and every book.

Makerightpub.com indicates:

"Here are general pricing guidelines when you want to sell a book, especially an eBook:

• If your book appeals to a huge number of people, you should price it lower.
• If your book appeals to a small number of people, you should price it higher."

Personally, I don't believe such general rules are as applicable in the world of self-publishing.  The beauty of self-publishing is that it lets the author test the waters due to a variety of market conditions.  Thinking of a price as a fluid concept rather than a fixed number might be the best way to proceed.  Experiment with the number that works best for you.  Maybe that number is zero.  Maybe it's much higher.  Maybe this will fluctuate based upon marketing endeavors.  It may be more about trial and error than about setting the lowest price.

I've only been at this for a few months, and certainly my sales are nothing stellar, so I don't claim expertise in the matter.  I'm just giving my opinion.  That opinion is this: the future of ebooks won't be about a set number, such as $0.99, or lower.  It will be about skillfully navigating what you should give away, what you should charge for, and what your market will allow you to charge for a return on your investment.  For some people, myself included, that return (readers who might actually enjoy the work) is worth more than profit.  For the more professional or profit-oriented, it may not be.  One thing that seems certain is that the ebook market is only projected to grow.  It will be interesting to see how authors use pricing to distinguish themselves in the future and how reader expectations will begin to shape the industry.