Weird Economics of Ebooks?

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

An article from Forbes about whether large corporations' opinions are right or wrong naturally is going to lead to a predetermined answer....

Fortunately, this is not about a "large corporation." Radiohead walked away from their record label and essentially self-published In Rainbows. I'd be shocked if Radiohead, as an entity, qualifies as a "large corporation."

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

....I don't think this counts as valid proof of anything, especially not a contention supported by someone who is firmly and immovably on the large publishers' side.

I suggest you set aside your biases for a moment, and just concentrate on some basic and simple facts. The In Rainbows download did the following:

- No DRM
- high quality (160kbps)
- put out directly by the band
- all revenues went directly to the band
- downloaders could pay whatever amount they wanted, including free
- no geographic restrictions (afaik)
- the only barrier was putting in your name, email, address (which, by the way, is necessary if you're going to use a credit card to give the band $1)
- people still pirated it in large numbers

And of course, nowadays you have quite a bit of DRM-free and cheap music -- Amazon's MP3's, eMusic's MP3's, Apple's DRM-free tracks. It still does not appear to have made a significant dent in piracy rates.

Quibble as much as you like, these facts are pretty clear. Lots of other things are wildly unclear -- such as, how much of that piracy actually resulted in lost sales, and what percent of legit sales is cannibalizing CD sales.

But it's pretty clear that for whatever reasons, it is essentially impossible thwart piracy even by giving people 95% of what they want via legit means.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

You're joking, right? The chances that they didn't just make up the numbers out of thin air to support whatever agenda they have, is rather slim.

Would you like some vermouth with your bitters?

They pooled about a dozen surveys, so no I don't think they invented the numbers. I don't vouch for their accuracy, I just don't think their percentages are likely to be off by a factor of 10.

Of course, if you're going to argue that IFPI is full of it, please feel free to present evidence that correlates drops in piracy rates in tandem with the rise of legit / DRM-free song downloads, or that a small amount (say, 10%) of all music downloads are pirated rather than legit.

[paola]

Originally Posted by mdmorrissey

The revolution will begin when individuals can sell or lend their ebooks the way they can their paper books.

I guess the difficulty here is that, unlike a second hand paper book, an e-book is not really second hand - unless the file is corrupt for some reason, if I were to give you a copy of my ebook, it would be as "pristine" as when I first read it - or as I read it for the umpteenth time.

So the only discount you would get on it is if you have some doubt that the seller is selling you a genuine ebook and not some empty file, but this is a problem of confidence not unlike buying stuff on ebay, it could be easily got around with some kind of reputation system. So if individuals could sell or lend their own books, they could in principle sell millions of them, drive the price down to zero, and publishers would go bust. And perhaps this is the way it will end up eventually...

[tompe]

Originally Posted by paolamanzini

I guess the difficulty here is that, unlike a second hand paper book, an e-book is not really second hand - unless the file is corrupt for some reason, if I were to give you a copy of my ebook, it would be as "pristine" as when I first read it - or as I read it for the umpteenth time.

The text in a paper book does not change after it is read so the text is as pristine. And if you read carefully the book is as new also.

[paola]

Originally Posted by tompe

The text in a paper book does not change after it is read so the text is as pristine. And if you read carefully the book is as new also.

well, it depends - think of books you take to the beach, or which you underline, or on which you make notes, not to mention textbooks, that are highly underlined (and often mistreated). And think of all those people that are not careful readers and do not currently consider selling their books.
If e-books could be sold second hand, a publisher would be in trouble (you still need the author to produce something if you want to go down the "new edition" route), as no matter how you "mistreat" the copy you read (and I am assuming you are saving your notes/comments etc. on the file), you could (and already can) still keep a clean original, creating the potential for a flood of "good quality" second hand textbooks.

[MovieBird]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

But it's pretty clear that for whatever reasons, it is essentially impossible thwart piracy even by giving people 95% of what they want via legit means.

It's my understanding that several of the music specific trackers specifically prohibited the Radiohead release, as well as any other release that is freely available for download. I'm sure you could still find it on the Pirate Bay immediately, but the trackers for serious consumers of audio vehemently supported the Radiohead experiment.