But I am nowhere suggesting that this bundle was not successful in and of itself, but then so are a great many things still using the older systems that suit publishers notions.
There are still successful movies and tv shows and ebooks that charge full retail price equivalent to their hardback or paperback prices.

“there’s always going to be freeloaders and cheapskates. Always has been, always will be. The trick is to get the cash off those people who will pay, which is what these models try to do.”

The beauty of digital files as I know you know, is that those you refer to as freeloaders or cheapskates bring no actual costs to the publishers/distributors/artists. The supposed cheapskates who might be only willing to part with a dollar are people who would simply be increasing your take by a dollar. The key is how many of them are there and could their dollars and less than dollars still add up to more than the relatively high spending ones who are making the humble bundles successful at the level they are at and who feel that they are getting a bargain at the price they are paying.

My point is that those put off by having to exceed the average price will possibly go elsewhere (as you point out they can) which is to the detriment of the bundle’s take. Which, we agree is still successful even if that is the case.

The point I keep trying and apparently failing to make is that we all tend to have these inbuilt suppositions which have their basis and fact in the analogue world where product has real value outside of the creators representation of their ideas and transposing them awkwardly to the digital world where the digital file itself does not have any actual value at all. It is an effectively free delivery mechanism and that is all it is.

“But, when you market a product you have to have a target market. If one demographic feels less attracted to a product because of how you position it elsewhere, then so be it.”

The thing here, is that in the online world, the market is surely anyone who would like to read one, some or all of those books and is the perceived need to target those with greater disposable incomes actually the benefit it’s believed to be or is it leaving a lot of money from supposed cheapskates in said cheapskates pockets, could what is undoubtedly a success story otherwise be a greater, by orders of magnitude, success if we could throw off our ideas of what we decide is reasonable market value
and that applies whether it’s the idea of market value that a lot of publishers have where they price ebooks at the same or greater than paper or even hardback prices or when the humble bundle sort of determines it to be the average price paid.

To me, the first time most people encountered the issue of “piracy” we probably all sort of agreed in principle that if people could have something for nothing then they probably wouldn’t pay for that same thing.
We even thought that, in situations where we ourselves would still pay; on that assumption that people tend to have that others are always more venal than they are.
As when doctors, just as an example, always believe that it is “other” doctors who are more likely to be affected by pharmaceutical companies marketing efforts than they believe they themselves are.
Unlike the trolls however, we saw the facts, where certain titles were intensively pirated but seemed to have no impact on the sales and success of those titles as with Avatar or indeed those specific and individual examples where sales were clearly boosted by piracy rather than the negative effects that are supposed to occur.
So, I believe, many of us, who are not of the trollish variety then realised we needed to rethink what initially may have seemed to be simply basic common sense to us.
We learnt as Mike pointed out that in business, claiming not to be able to compete with free is the same as claiming to not be able to compete at all. Things like kickstarter and humble bundles and any one of hundreds of different trials and experiments demonstrated that people were still willing to hand over lots and lots of money in support of people who produced the kinds of thing they want.
We learnt that we ourselves could well find ourselves technically pirating products that we had bought simply to get around the inconvenience of the DRM mechanisms incorporated with our purchases.
We also may have noticed that we would get turned on to a particular product through someone who had themselves pirated that movie or game and noted that we and our friends then ended up paying for something we otherwise would never have come across at all.
We grasped that DRM only affected those who handed their good money over at the level the publishers wanted and had no impact on everyone else and that everyone else was in fact getting the more useful and usable product.
The trolls show no development, they take no facts on board, they have their idea, their “seems like basic common sense” initial thought and seek only to bolster that initial incorrect view by dragging in anything, no matter how out of context, to support it.
Despite this, some of their ramblings do touch on potentially interesting questions, not as they frame them, paying for the humble bundle is not a paywall, but if we remove their nonsense and actually look at what “seems like common sense” notions we have kept unchallenged in ourselves.

None of this is to suggest that the humble bundle and other examples have been anything other than successful, it is simply wondering whether we still have some adjustments to make to this online world where the actual value of the distribution mechanism is effectively zero and where even a dollar might be quite an unneccessarily high valuation to place on any individual item and whether our disdain for 20 cent purchases and cheapskates and freeloaders may be our own troll-like inability to move past a preconceived and invalid notion that we have ported over from the analogue world.

It is hard to say and yes people will keep on experimenting and tweaking and we all know that give it away and pray is not likely to be the best possible solution, but remembering that we do particularly need to keep questioning those certainties that we have but which we simply have by default based primarily on a false analogy between the analogue and online digital world.

That we may be failing less than the copyright maximalists and trolls does not make the questions irrelevant.
There is plenty of fail to go around after all.

Does it make sense to market to only a portion of your potential purchasers?

All in all, we fundamentally agree on many things, including the fact that the humble bundle amongst many others is proof that you can treat customers much much better than they are currently being treated by established industries and make plenty of money, in some cases more than they could hope to make by more traditional practices.