Look at this: my novels for sale at iBooks.
Ammonite (1993): $11.99
Slow River (1995): $11.99
The Blue Place (1998): $9.99
Stay (2002): $9.99
Always (2007): $12.99
If there’s a better way to show the lack of sense in ebook pricing, I don’t know what it might be.
But it’s not just the prices that are thoroughly confusing. Look at how each book is characterised:
Ammonite: ‘Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Adventure’
Slow River: ‘Fiction & Literature’
The Blue Place: ‘Gay’
Stay: ‘Hard-Boiled’
Always: ‘Literary’
I can’t make this make sense. Ammonite and Slow River are from the same publisher. They’re both well-written science fiction with lesbian characters. Both have adventure (and sex). Both have extrapolative science. Both are novels of character. So why is one ‘literature’ and the other ‘adventure’? How would you classify them?
The really mind-boggling bit, though, is the variety of description for The Blue Place, Stay, and Always. Three novels about the same character, Aud. Yet one is ‘gay’ (Aud is not a man, for those who are confused), one is ‘hard-boiled’ and one ‘literary’. One day I’ll get all the rights back and republish as ‘Literature & Lesbian: series crime fiction’ or somesuch. How would you describe them?
What’s the most ridiculous book tag/description you’ve seen to date?
Nicola Griffith 
This is what you get for writing literate fiction that crosses genre lines. ;D
Stating that I HATE labels, if I were forced to label Ammonite and Slow River, I'd say they were “soft science fiction,” as opposed to “hard science fiction” like I, Robot and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. (I'm sure this just shows how out of science fiction I am these days.)
TBP, Stay and Always I'd label as Crime Fiction. Yes, Aud is lesbian, but that's not what the books are about.
It looks like the store you shop affects the price you pay, even for ebooks. The Sony ebook store is charging $12.99 (Canadian) for “Stay” (13% off list price, it claims), but the Kobo ebook store is charging $10.49 for it.
Unlike the Kindle, Sony and Kobo share a standard format and common DRM system, so I can buy the book from the Kobo store and load it on to my Sony reader easily.
I'm willing to bet a small amount of money that the book price has a slight correlation to the device price, and publishers assume that device stores are “sticky”.
David, Kobo is based in Canada. But, hmmmn, agency pricing means there shouldn't be variation. Interesting.
I don't see why 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' could be considered 'harder' science than 'Slow River.' The science in 'Electric Sheep' seems rather considerably less likely than that in 'Slow River,' so unless there's some sort of automatic assumption that men write 'harder' sf than women, there doesn't seem like a lot of evidence for such a classification. In any case, it should definitely be included in the SF category.
What I find mind-boggling, though, are the weird discrepancies in the classification of the Aud novels. WTF?
Though, to be fair, I tend to shop much more by authors than by genre (except insofar as you can consider 'queer' a viable generic classification).
Wendy, that sex/gender difference is something I talk about in “Hard Takes Soft, Again”, in the Science Fiction Studies Sex and SF Symposium a while back. (After much rootling about, I excavated the link. Scroll down to my piece.)