|
I didn't so much mind paying for CDs when I already owned the vinyl LP, because the sound quality was higher and the recordings were more durable. I honestly don't think the music and book cases are equivalent, because anyone who could download a music file from the internet could just as easily rip the CD to MP3 themselves, at this point, whereas books are still time-consuming to scan and OCR, so people tend to want to distribute the effort. And unlike the vinyl to CD move, there aren't strong value-adds to digital books yet. If the publishers would start adding extra content to digital versions of books (author essays, scans of author notes or sketches, a short story, chapters of other books, whatever), I'd be a lot more willing to pay for ebooks when I already own the pbook. (I've bought DVDs of content I owned on VHS tapes for the same reason.)
|