Quote:
Originally Posted by Pinecone
But just the question of why would the OP think that a book that is currently in print, at a current pbook pricing, would be availble as an ebook for a substantially reduced price?
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Because
1) The ebook costs substantially less to produce and distribute; pricing it the same as the pbook is an open declaration that production costs are irrelevant.
It doesn't matter how much people insist that the "real" price is "whatever the market will bear;" traditionally, what the market will bear is strongly influenced by material costs and scarcity. Cubic zirconia are only distinguishable from diamonds with a microscope; there's no reason for them to be cheaper--but they are.
2) Publishers insist that ebooks aren't sold with the same rights as pbooks--that, actually, they're not sold at all; they're licensed. Movie rentals cost less than movie purchases; why shouldn't book rentals--with an open-ended due date of "whenever we think you shouldn't have it anymore, or when your OS gets upgraded to something that can't read it"--cost less?
3) Ebooks are often lower-quality than pbooks: they often lack high-resolution cover art, functional tables of contents, or *proofread text.*
4) No resale market. No hand-it-to-a-friend-when-I'm-done. No sharing it with the local book club. No donating it to a library. (How many people treat pbooks as "when I'm done reading this for the last time, I'll just throw it in the shredder?" Which is apparently how we're most publishers expect us to treat ebooks.)
5) Limited research uses... hard to photocopy a few pages and use them for classwork; annotation ability strictly limited by software & hardware.
6) No guarantee that, if the buyer is reasonably careful, it'll still be readable in a generation.
Hardcover books last decades, sometimes centuries. Ebooks can't make that claim. Ebooks are marketed as limited-use disposable entertainment; it's not unreasonable to expect them to be priced equivalent to mass-market paperbacks--or less, because the production costs are lower.