Quote:
Originally Posted by AzB
This is, of course, one of the reasons the music industry had to deal with rampant piracy a dozen years ago. The price for cds was fixed ridiculously high. This makes piracy more attractive to those who would otherwise probably not bother with piracy.
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I don't think that's quite right. CDs weren't that expensive 10 years ago...and even cheaper CDs were pirated. The real issue with music piracy was that people couldn't buy mp3s at all (at first), or conveniently (second). I.e., if you wanted, say, "Bohemian Rhapsody" in 1999, you could either buy the CD and rip it, or download it from Napster. You couldn't buy it the mp3 online *anywhere.* Later, in some cases, you could buy the whole album digitally, but you couldn't just buy the single. Itunes was successful because they gave you a simple, one-stop shop to buy singles or albums, and they made it really easy to transfer your purchases to your device.
(IMO, the reason that the iPod came to dominate the mp3 player market was not because of the device itself, but because of how well iTunes worked with the iPod...not that iTunes is a perfect piece of software, but it's important to keep in mind just how horrible other software was in 2002).
But I think it's really important to point out how availability is much more important that cost...simply because you *can't* compete with free. No one can. I think that most people seem to feel that $1/song is a reasonable price for an mp3 - but if you've found 1,700 songs in the darknet, there is *no* price that the publishers could offer that can beat that, or even come close to that. Not that prices should be jacked up, but you have to recognize the limits of pricing.
Amazon, it's clear to me, borrowed a lot from the lessons of iTunes and focused on making the process of buying books and putting them on your e-reader as simple as possible. Amazon's comprehensive catalogue plus the ease of buying books is the reason that they have 70-80% of the US market. B&N started later, and while their system of putting books on your reader isn't quite as easy as Amazon's, it still compares favorably with, say, iTunes (where I still can't wirelessly sync, redownload music I've bought, or have things automatically sync between multiple devices).
I think the fact that Amazon and B&N have 95% of the US market is really good evidence that, at least within a range, price isn't that important. Even after the agency model kicked in, US e-books sales tripled and Amazon now sells more e-books than paperbacks or hardbacks. None of which would have happened if people had been particularly price sensitive.