Books cost too much

Or so that old Crown Books ad said.  (I presume that you need to be of my vintage to even remember Crown Books.)  This article about the ongoing decline and fall of academic publishing was, as always, a reminder that most academics do not buy lots of monographs because most academics cannot afford to buy them.  In fact, I wonder just how much the adjunctification of the academic work force has affected book sales: if you're being paid not that much money, then most of that not that much money will go elsewhere than into the hands of academic publishers.  But even a reasonably well-compensated academic like myself has considerable limits, despite what my lists of acquisitions appear to indicate.   I can't afford to buy the average Oxford or Cambridge monograph unless Amazon has drastically slashed the price or somebody is selling a secondhand copy.  As many of the relevant monographs for my work are published by Oxford or Cambridge, that's...a problem.  The same goes for non-university presses like Routledge, Bloomsbury, Palgrave Macmillan, or Pickering & Chatto (all those pretty collected editions, none affordable to mere mortals).  More reasonable publishers--University Press of Virginia, say--will bring out books in the high $40s-low $50s, which is much less hard on the average senior scholar's wallet, but possibly still too much for junior or adjunct faculty; at least Virginia reliably prices its paperbacks in the $20s.   I do buy academic eBooks when they're under $20 or so, but given that we don't own eBooks, there's no way that I'm going to spend $40, $50, or more for one (let alone $100 and up!).  I'm not sure how one interrupts the destructive loop in which nobody buys books (because they cost too much) so publishers raise the price (because nobody buys books).