Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
...Apple changed that model because you didn't have to buy the whole album. You could cherry pick and get just the songs you wanted, import them into iTunes and create custom playlists.
In some respects, it put music back the way it used to be. Individual songs became important, not albums. And the album was no longer the "product". While it was still important, you didn't tour just to promote the album. You toured because more and more, you made your actual living playing live gigs. The album became a souvenir of the show, and not the reason the show was put on in the first place.
This is what I'm talking about when I say music and books aren't directly comparable. Unless the book is a collection of short stories, you aren't going to see people cherry picking bits and pieces. They'll get the whole book or not at all. And authors can't exactly go out and perform live as their principal income. Their money comes from book sales.
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Well, I'll agree that currently authors don't have much prospects in making a living going on tour.
My point is this: It was not Apple who changed the model of being able to select a few tracks. Again, it was Napster. What iTunes did was show that in a world when the big companies wanted $18.00 and the kids were paying nothing by going to Napster, people were willing to pay 99 cents when they could get what they wanted for free.
So in this sense I believe that music and books are comparable. If most books (I'm thinking that most books are back catalogue) are available for $2.99, people will pay rather than get a pirate edition for free. But if forty-year old books like Catch-22 are going to be $12.00, people will go the pirate route, and the authors will get nothing.
By the way, one concept I haven't seen discussed here at MR is the idea that official editions should be perfect quality and pirate editions should be imperfect. I am referring to being proofread, mostly.
Consider forty years ago when one could make a cassette tape of a friend's record. The tape wasn't as good sonically, but its price was only the cost of the blank cassette. It seems to me that it would not be unreasonable to have a situation where the free pirate edition is loaded with typos while the $2.99 official release is perfect.
In that scenario, I believe that most people would pay the $2.99. But if the eBook is $10.00, I believe that many will choose to tolerate the typos and go for the free edition.