Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Neko, I follow what you're saying. What I'm not sure about is what this says about the e-book... whether it is intrinsically worth something, or not.
You seem to suggest that, if the e-book is created after the work has been done (and paid for) to create the printed books, then the comparatively miniscule cost and effort involved in e-book production renders the e-books to be a zero-cost item, and essentially should be free.
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No, Steve, I'm really
not trying to say that. I'm trying to say that the incremental value of the ebook
if one already has the pbook may be small. If I don't have the pbook, the ebook is full value of the author's work, the editor's work, typesetting, illustration, etc. Probably production costs and certainly fulfillment costs are lower, so I'd expect to see a discount compared to what the price would have been for a paper version. But the content has value, the labor required to prepare it for publication has value, and I do believe that value should be paid for.
On the other hand, if the publisher
does not offer an ebook version, and volunteers prepare ebook versions without asking for compensation for their labor, I find it hard to understand why it is a problem for someone who
has paid for the book in paper to receive an ebook version from someone else.
In cases where only an ebook version is available, all this is moot. The ebook has the value of a book, and that depends on the quality of the book, I suppose, and what the market will accept. I would expect a price of somewhere around US$5 for a book of reasonable quality with professional editing.
I am most emphatically
not saying that ebooks have no value, whether pbook versions exist or not. The value of any book is the value of the content. If I already own an ebook, especially one without DRM so I can read it anywhere, etc., then by contrast the
paper version has quite low incremental value. I wouldn't expect someone to give me one for free, but if I found a stripped version in a discard pile behind a bookstore, and I had already purchased the book as an ebook, I suppose I wouldn't feel bad about picking it up and taking it home. (Other than the fact that I have too many pbooks here already.)
Perhaps that's a fair example. If you owned a hardcover book that you had paid for, and came across a stripped paperback (front cover removed and returned to the publisher for a refund), and you wanted the paperback for reasons of convenience (lighter weight, smaller, etc.), would you take it? Let's assume that you're not planning on doing something like giving or selling it to someone else, or even loaning it out while you read the hardcover.