I have to say, I think mis-pricing could harm the book industry as a whole, and in some cases delaying the e-book version will very likely turn some people to piracy. But I don't think e-books will get pirated to death. Let's face it, it takes all of 2 brainless minutes to make a high-fidelity copy of an entire CD; it takes hours to scan, format and edit a paper book into a digital format. A book will have to be fairly popular for someone to put that effort into it.
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Originally Posted by Moejoe
The more I digest of Chris Anderson's book (Free: The Future of a Radical Price) and the more I experience of the culture around me as it grows, the more convinced I am that selling any digital product will become frankly impossible in the future....
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Yeah, well. Free e-books, for anything other than promotional or early-career-advancement, is a dead end. You can't put enough ads into an e-book to turn a real profit, especially if you do not want to ruin the reading experience; and unlike musicians, writers don't have separate sources of revenue streams like merchandising or concerts.
Let me know when Facebook and YouTube actually generate a profit -- or better yet, let me know when Anderson releases an e-book version at no charge. Then we can talk about how everything should be Free.
