I saw a twitter exchange the other day, which says that subscriptions generated 72% of revenue and transactional sales 26%, so it seems lots of people do pay the insane prices.

I also note that these companies are quite active at lawsuits to try to suppress sci-hub, so they clearly do feel threatened. Given the general developments of SOPA/FOSTA/Article 13/Megaupload prosecution/etc, I would give them better than even odds of eventually suceeding. For computer science I don't think that would matter too much, because everyone is publishing their stuff directly on their homepage anyone, but e.g. in medicine there doesn't seem to be any similar culture, so, uh, enjoy the golden era of scientific access while it lasts.

I would also echo kleptoquark's comment that it's not clear to me that Elsevier contributes anything at all to the production processes. Maybe it was different a few decades ago, when you needed to print the journals on paper---back then I think the publishing companies basically handled all the "physical" parts of the pipeline.

Incidentally, while it's common (and, of course, proper) to condemn the absolute evil of Elsevier, I personally feel a greater hatred for the corrupted good of JSTOR. I mean, not only did they kill Aaron Swartz, but also they are a non-profit organization with a nominal mission of providing access to papers; and they do so my adding paywalls to them, suing people who circumvent the paywalls, and spending almost all their budget on sending their management on glitzy holidays conference trips.