Agreed, on many counts. That said, I am not a lawyer, nor am I a publishing expert; I'm an author-in-the-trenches, and that could have been my publisher getting smacked with a brick. The pricing structure needs looked at, but the costs cannot be overlooked.

(Also, doing the coding from the text doesn't address the author advice, the copyeditor, the cover artist, or any of the other many, many pre-publication steps. If Amazon were helping to cover these, the water would be a lot less muddy in some ways.)