You have to look at the market. People that buy this app are going to be "in the know" and be serious about the bar exam and thus willing to spend some serious time AND money preparing for it. For the target audience this is not random purchase.
Not to mention that they're going to need nearly all of the material in order to properly study, so it doesn't make much sense to break it into pieces (at least in the case of the bar exam).
hunch: this is how the textbook market should be in general (obviously not 1,000 per app). i have a feeling the tablet will be the platform for content like this/textbooks.
To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that after forking out x * 10^5 or even 10^6 dollars on tuition fee, you have to spend thousands of dollars on apps and textbooks to stand a chance on the exam. There is something very wrong with the US higher education system.
Quite interesting: I don't think I have seen (serious) software for handsets that's more expensive than the hardware (for PC's this isn't uncommon). If you want to run this, the costs of an iPod Touch to run it on are almost negligible (well, about 20%).
Buying topo maps for handheld GPS devices can easily cost more than the device itself. Garmin charges $120 for topo maps of the northeast alone, for a device that costs 100-200.
I've seen a lot of commercial uses for rugged palm pilots too, the special case software for that is probably quite expensive.
As handsets become cheaper for the computing they deliver, this will become an accepeted norm for specialized software (my computer costs less than 10% of the value of the software on it)
