"Price set by seller"

Read an excellent book that I intend on reviewing soon - luckily it was available through my library.

• As of this writing, it's priced at $9.99 for Kindle.  Amazon included their usual "Price set by seller", meaning "You want agency pricing?  Here's your agency pricing."
• Again, excellent book, but it's a decades old genre novel that should run $2.99-$4.99.
• For your extra money, the text was filled with as more typos than your typical self-published book ran through spell check a couple times.
• The author surely benefited from Traditional Publishing's marketing magic:  their "About the Author" listed the biography of a computer programmer specializing in geology.
• I'm sure their accountants know what the best price point is.  Based on the Amazon rank, the Kindle version has sold two copies in the last month.  That's probably a big $3.50 royalty check for the author.  Going self-published at $2.99 would have a higher return of around $4.20 and probably sell more copies.

I found this disappointing, especially since I've been coming across tons of 80s horror and action being reprinted at reasonable prices.

I'm half-convinced that the Big 5 traditional publishers want to destroy their customer base.  There are folks out there that devour genre fiction by the score, but they seem focused on the mainstream audience that maybe buys two bestsellers a year.