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Originally Posted by rhadin
I say to myself, "Why spend $14.99 on an Agency 6 title, or even $9.99, or why spend $3.99 on a Smashwords title, when I have hundreds of free ebooks to choose among?"
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Because I do have a book budget, and I like supporting authors--I just want to feel I got enough value for my money. So I'll read samples at Smashwords (no sample=no sale); if I'm hooked by the end of the sample and really want to know what happens next, I buy it. If I was cringing at the bad punctuation or couldn't get into the storyline, I don't.
Which means a 10-page sample that's half table-of-contents is a lot less likely to result in a sale than a 50% sample. (WTF, authors, do you think people are cheating you if they get to read half the novel before deciding whether to buy? Are your writing skills so lousy that you think people will walk away if they've read that far?)
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Originally Posted by leebase
Nope. It's NICE that we've had libraries and used books for all these centuries, but they are hardly required. It is those who actually contribute financially to the creation of content that enable the creation of content. Billy is not served in ANY way by harming or devaluing the creation of books.
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What "devaluing the creation of books?" I don't think anyone's saying authors should work for free. A lot of us are saying that if the goal is "earn $50k for the year I spent writing this book," that may be easier to do by selling 14k ebooks at $5 than 7k at $10. And it's possible that'll be easier to do by selling 28k books at $3. We are also saying it'll be much harder to make that $50k by selling 10,000 hardcovers at $30.
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I can't afford Mercedez Benz's, but it's a good thing that SOME folks can. If you lowered the prices of luxury cars to the point I could and would choose to buy them you'd eliminate all reason that such things would be created in the first place.
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Ebooks are luxury items like Mercedes Benzes?
Right now, ebooks are a luxury/technogeek item. That's shifting; people want them to be common academic items and casual leisure entertainment. When the cost of readers drops below $100 (we're on that edge right now), they shift from "exotic expensive content delivery system" to "the text version of a Walkman"--and cheap & free ebooks are going to be the majority of what gets loaded onto those readers.
And like music, there's not going to be any way to track "did this person pay for the book he's reading today?"
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And the reality is we are nowhere close to the time when actual books and used books and libraries have ceased to exist.
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No, we're not. But we're close to the time when used MMPBs are harder to find locally than to buy for $4 each (one penny + shipping) from Amazon. Which drastically changes the amount & types of information that are widely available.
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Society will not benefit by making information free. Patents and copywright laws are the foundation of Western civilizations success and prosperity. In the digital age there HAS to be Intellectual Property that can be enforced or we will severely halt the march of progress. No one will spend the time and effort to create works that cannot be protected.
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I'm not saying copyright should be abolished--I just want it shortened to as little as possible that works as an incentive for wide distribution, and for the focus of it to go back to commercial exploitation, not casual sharing.
Copyright infringement penalties are huge because they were designed to go after corporations, not individuals. If they're going to be focused at individuals, the whole legal structure has to be reconsidered: what's a "public performance?" Does it include six guys in a bar singing a pop song to a girl to flirt with her? Can they be sued for infringement?