Part of an email I just received from them:
Dear Reader Store Customer,
The publishing industry is turning a page and so are we.
Beginning April 1st some major publishers will be instituting a change in the pricing of eBooks, which puts decisions on eBook pricing firmly in their hands. As a result, prices of bestsellers and new releases from these publishers will be changing on the Reader Store, and during the transition time, some titles may be unavailable. Although most of these eBooks will be priced from about $12.99 to 14.99, there will not be a broad pricing change across the Reader Store. In fact, new releases and bestsellers from other publishers will still be priced at $9.99.
This is a problem that annoys me, I don’t pretend to know a whole lot about pricing books but if you go to a store and a book is $9.99, the next day the price will still be $9.99. What I’ve noticed in the Reader Store is that one day a book can be $3 and people will begin to buy it. The next day it becomes a best seller in an area and bam, $12.34. I especially love events like, when a new book comes out in a series and it’s a best seller, the rest of the books in the series will be dramatically raised. For example, one of Kim Harrison’s Witch Series was a few dollars so I picked it up and read it. She recently published a high selling book and every other book in the series saw skyrocketing prices. This is ridiculous and I wish I had known this before purchasing my reader. Oftentimes it would be more than a few dollars cheaper to buy and ship a book to myself from Amazon than purchase it on my Sony Reader.