How do you price a book?

A great paradox .... how do you price a book ? while you have some books which quote at something like 95/- and some paperbacks which quote at 400 plus rupees.
I don't get it , a paperback is meant to make the book reachable to more people and more so from the fact that the hardbound edition has made some money and the paperback is either meant to recover whatever money is required and or increase subscription.

Some of the major contributors to this are ;
1. Author's royalty ( or sometimes a flat fee for the same )
2. Publisher's brand / premium
3. hardbound / paperback...

Here the noble thought of making the book accessible to a wider population is lost ... you have books by a few authors which are way to expensive to the average man and in some cases the academic population - the student is left out of the equation. I do agree libraries are there for this but there too with regard to works of fiction / non fiction become unreacheable to many.

I just saw some paperbacks of thomas friedman and krugman etc which have about 500 pages quoting at somewhere in the range of 400 rupees , I would rather call it a glorified hardbound rather than a paperback. This in turn leads many ( including me ) to either look for the book online or scrounge the various back streets of bangalore for the same at a fraction of the cost.
Books which are supposedly good but by an author not well known are allso priced similarly ... especially management books ( maybe I too should write a book!!! ) and then after investing a considerable sum on the same , find the book below standards leading more to the street sellers.
I do release that book publishers also have to cut trees and pay a lot of people starting from the typesetter to the copywriter... but then it becomes a question of who should sacrifice for the sake of literacy... the author ? the publisher ? the book seller ?....

Chennaizombie