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Originally Posted by GA Russell
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.
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How are you defining back catalog? If you equate it with "out of print", the publisher may not have the rights to issue the ebook - they reverted to the author when the books went out of print.
And assuming everyone will go the pirate route is questionable. Don't assume the readership of MR are representative of the broader market. By definition, we're early adopters and more savvy about this stuff.
You might not pay $12 for an electronic version of an older book, but enough other folks might to make it a viable price.
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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.
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Tell that to Amazon. In many cases, there wasn't an electronic file to start with, so the Kindle edition is produced by scan and OCR of a hardcopy by an outsourced operation in India. The result odf the scan and OCR is what gets packaged at the Kindle edition. There is no editing and proofreading to catch errors. That costs money.
In more and more cases, proofreading isn't being done even when there is an electronic file. Publishers are omitting the step. It costs money.
You want your ebooks cheap. Where does the money to pay for proofreading come from?
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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.
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Given the quality of the playback equipment, you might not even have noticed the difference in quality. (A radio station I listened to back when had an "Album for lunch" show. Come noon, they'd play an entire album, straight through, no commercial breaks, and broadcast a Dolby test tone first so people could calibrate their recorders. Ah, the good old days...)
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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.
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What folks will pay will depend on the book and how badly they want it.
You're focused on back catalog, because there are things you would like to see that are out of print. There are an assortment of reasons, mentioned earlier, why this might be the case. But the biggest one will be the least palatable: maybe there simply aren't enough people interested in seeing those works returned to print to make it worth doing. That's certainly the case for a few things I wouldn't mind seeing back in circulation: I may be one of the two people I know who has ever heard of it.
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Dennis