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Originally Posted by craig8128
What an interesting (and really long) thread!
I'm almost afraid to post anything here, because maybe I'm just repeating an argument that happened on (say) page 14 of this thread. But I have a few semi-random comments ...
It seems to me that, pragmatically, the ebook sellers need to figure out the "sweet spot" in pricing for an ebook -- where that's a price plus ease-of-process that (for most people) beats searching for a pirated version. This "spot" won't be the same for everyone, but if you can come up with something that works for 80% of the population, you've really got something. I think iTunes got it right pricing songs at ~99cents.
Looking at ebook prices on Amazon, B&N, and elsewhere -- I gotta tellya, $10.99 is *not* the "sweet spot". Not in this economy. But -- $4.99? With no shipping, direct download of a quality edition? That might be more realistic.
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Itunes charges $9.99 for an album. Which, probably not coincidentally, was Amazon's pre-Agency price for new books on Kindle. And I think that that probably is the "sweet spot" for hardback equivalents from traditional publishers. Based in part by people's reactions when publishers went above that amount.
If the only price that publishers could get for new e-books was $4.99, they would stop producing e-books. And it's hard to take seriously complaints about "this economy" by people who are using e-book readers (including iPads).
And I do think it's kind of cute how everyone now goes on and on about how ebooks should be so much cheaper than paper books because of the $2 or so that publishers don't have to spend on ink and paper and shipping - when the difference between hardback and paperback prices has always been much greater than the difference in the cost of materials.
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Also -- I hate DRM, but I could probably learn to live with it if I got a DRMed ebook with my purchase of the paper book. My biggest issue with DRM is that it's practically a guarantee that the book will be unreadable 5+ years down the road. I sometimes wonder about "time-lock" DRM: the book is DRMed for 3 years, and then it automatically opens itself up. Given the average lifespan of books in bookstores -- would that be so bad?
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That's a concern, although so far DRM (or different formats, even) has not presented much of a challenge for people wanting to remove it, AFAICT.
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[snip]
I really do think that copyright law in the USA is broken badly. IMHO, copyright should last until the author's death.
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Why copyright and not other forms of property? By this logic, we might as well say that when you die, all of your property goes to the state rather than to your heirs. Aside from which, copyright needs to have a predictable termination point so that companies are willing to buy it in the first place. Why would anyone pay millions of dollars for the rights to make a movie of, say, Harry Potter, when those rights could be obtained for free if Rowlings were hit by a bus? The period should also be long enough that the author can get a good price for selling the copyrighted work (meaning that he is selling the rights for a long enough period of time for someone to want to pay a lot of money for it). Having said that, death + 70 years may be too long.
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And finally -- something that I think gets overlooked when talking about piracy is that many people, once they have a shiny new ebook reader in their hands, immediately want to go out and fill it with electronic books that they already own and enjoy in paper. This in mind, I think that many "pirates" are simply people who don't feel that they need to pay twice for the same book. And you even have people like Randy Cohen, the author of the NYT's column "The Ethicist", saying that it's okay to do this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/ma...thicist-t.html
Okay, I'm done. I hope you had as much fun reading this rant as I had writing it.
Craig
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I'm sure that some piracy is ethically harmless, and some is the equivalent of stealing.
Although I do wonder if e-book piracy will ever be as widespread as music piracy, simply due to the inconvenience of making the copies and the inconvenience of obtaining the copies. (Particularly if you have become accustomed to Amazon's free 3G delivery).