Quote:
Originally Posted by slayda
Another opportunity for Sony to make money.
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That Penguin gives away ebooks, considering what Penguin has to offer is great news, but is it really where things should go?
I suspect they are right, ebooks at this stage will probably promote paper book sales. But that will not be the case in the distant future (or midrange).
I would rather have a system of micro-cash, where ebooks are brought for very small amounts.
The point being that authors, translators, coders and publishers should get something for their labour, and as the potential market size is in the millions this could mean a healthy income, for books that sell for 50 cents or less.
Compared to print the costs are much less, stocks do not have to be stored or remainders disposed. It should, over time, be commercially viable to produce ebooks at a very low price electronically, which would be a great thing for all of us.
But only if some form of micro-cash is in use beforehand, otherwise we would see the absurdity of some ebooks being priced close to paper books, when the costs of publication of the former is trivial.
Instead of being free, being nearly free would kick start things, but what is needed is a simple and secure way of sending transactions as little as 0.001 of a cent.
An old Penguin (there are some great old Penguins long out of print), for 5-10 cents would not take long to pay for the scanning and markup costs, and maybe even turn a little profit - that way there is an incentive to keep producing ebooks, especially of out of print works.
Ebooks should aim to make available a new Alexandrian library, where any person can for a few dollars have a huge corpus at their fingertips. For that there needs to be an underlying economy.
Sorry this probably the wrong thread to bring this up, I am new to the forum.
Greg Schofield
Perth Australia