Jack Shafer wrote a column for Slate about e-books, publishers, pricing, and the lessons of Napster.

It doesn’t make me a defender of illegal file-sharing to say that the music industry goofed by waiting until 2003 to agree to sell individual tracks for the reasonable price of 99 cents. Its absence from the electronic-music market in those early years allowed illegal file-sharing to take root and spread, and it helped shape the perception, especially among younger consumers, that music “should” be free.