Quote:
Originally Posted by wgrimm
When one considers digital media, given the fact that it costs nothing to produce a new copy, some of the old economic rules have to be reconsidered.
It seems that producers want to keep only the old rules that benefit them. For example, the customer must pay almost paper book prices for the e-book, but he does not have the right to return or resell the e-book. The reality of the digital marketplace is that you have sunk costs (the costs required to actually produce the work) and you have extremely minimal dfistribution costs- you don't have to buy paper and ink, etc. You aren't offering a tangible physical product, so your prices should go down.
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In the case you quote, an $80 pBook being offered as a $50 eBook, that seems like a pretty reasonable pricing structure to me; the $30 difference is a fair representation of the fact that the publisher has no printing or distribution costs.
You can't expect a publisher to lower the price of e-Book because it has no resale value, however. The publisher doesn't receive back any of the value, after all, when the paper book is resold.
I agree with you - it would be very nice, with books like this, if the publisher were to allow purchasers of the pBook to download the eBook for a nominal sum. Many of the programming books I've bought lately have come with a CD containing an eBook version included with the pBook.