[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

I understand the argument that the accountants should assign the eBook edition its fair share of the burden of the publisher's creating the book. And I don't disagree.

Good.

Yet as I understand it, there is a huge number of books available for free on the darknet.

There are indeed.

So if the pirate can create the eBook for next to nothing,

The pirate is donating his or her labor. The people who work for publishers expect to be paid for what they do.

And the pirate is working from an existing copy, either scanning, OCRing, and proofreading a paper book to make an electronic copy, or breaking DRM on an existing ebook and sharing the copy.

What the pirate is doing is a small fraction of the total work involved.

I think that the publishers are out of line to suggest that the creation of the eBook is a large expense.

No one is claiming the creation of an ebook is a huge expense, in the sense of what is needed to get a final electronic manuscript into an ebook format. The claim is simply that most of the costs of producing a book occur before it ever reaches the stage of being published in any form.

I think this goes back to the debate about the Labor Theory of Value. The Austrians showed that just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, value is in the eye of the purchaser.

Correct. Something is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. If what the market is willing to pay for it is not enough to cover the cost of production and a reasonable return for the producer, it may not get made.

So I think that the publishers are justified to charge a high price for an eBook best seller just off the press that is in the news. But I see little justification for the setting of the price of a backlist fiction eBook near that of the paperback version. That's just price gouging.

<shrug>

Pricing is what the market will bear. Publishers set those prices because they think they can get it. If they can sell the desired number of copies at that price, they can get it, and have no incentive to lower the price. Publishers are all still finding out what they can successfully charge for an ebook, and there's a lot of wishful thinking on both sides about what the price can be.

My personal feeling is that when the dust settles, the price will be around that of the mass market PB edition, but won't fall to that level until the mass market PB would be issued. They will want to get the revenue from people who will pay a premium to read the book sooner, the same way people who want to read the book now spring for the hardcover instead of waiting a year for the MMPB.

Your "price gouging" may be my fair price. It depends on our desires and the relative value we assign to the product.

What happens if the ebook is the only edition? A lot of this discussion seems to assume the paper editions are somehow subsidizing the ebook. What happens when there is no paper edition to share the burden of the costs? A fair number of folks on MR dream of a day when the paper books go away, and only electronic editions are published.
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Dennis