What we need are new categories, I think. I am a grad student (and correspondingly poor) and I recently searched for some useful books on Sony's connect site. The limited selection they did have included academic books with three digit price-tags (that was in dollars, not pesos).
I can't afford that kind of content, and if I could get similar content from P1rate Bay I would probably do it.
I can't, by the way, but if you're looking for Tom Clancy it's your lucky day.
My point is that those of you who publish or have friends who are authors or musicians need to ask yourselves how much of the final price ends up in the pockets of the artist/author/writer anyway.
Do you really thing the author of
A Political Chronology of the Middle East is going to lose 175 dollars if I find a PDF of her book for free elsewhere online? Not likely. She'll be harmed, but more damage (relatively speaking) is done to the publisher.
And on a tangent...
In an
ebook environment, there's no reason for academic books to be so obscenely expensive anyway. Used to be that the limited run made the printing a financially questionable process. Now online texts can be digitally reproduced but the prices remain high. It's a tradition, I guess.
