Normally, I'd read through the entire thread to be certain I wasn't posting redundantly, but duty bleats and I soon must go:
HarryT:
This is not meant pejoratively, but you seem to be conflating personal value with what has traditionally determined costs before the shell-game of intellectual property: Production. The reason an eBook should always, always be cheaper is because they cost nothing to produce. Beyond whatever post-production was involved in the scanning/proofing/formatting of older books, each sale of an ebook is pure profit. There's literally an endless supply.
Instead of being able to inflate production costs at customers' expense, publishers must now find ways to make electronic customers pay even more to cover losses. It's a short-sighted solution perhaps championed by people close to retirement who don't have to worry about what happens when their companies lose customers permanently.
And the payoff is that we have a less literate society, in which even fewer people are exposed to important and rewarding books, because, out of the world's collective library, the paltry number of tomes available as carefully done ebooks are also obscenely overpriced.
And in the States, at least, the public library's a bad solution so far because (i) the limited number of eBook copies makes checkout periods impractical for any challenging text and (ii) the eBook selection contains very, very little of value. Visiting the eBook site of the New York Public Library is worse than walking into the commercial bookstore at an airport. Whereas the physical libraries are filled with rare and important books -- all available for several months at a time.
Of course, that's all changing now, and those who need to read Michelet's
The Insect in Adams's translation and illustrated by Giacomelli, or find Alfred Jarry's
Messalina in the Atlas Press edition, would be forced to buy physical copies new, track them down used for a premium, or sit empty-palmed and wonder what those books are like.
(You can find the extremely flawed public version of the first book
here and a sampling of Atlas books
here, though
Messalina and others have remained OOP for years -- I covet my copy of Max Jacob's
The Dice Cup.)
Think of the physical books of the past -- gilded-paged, leather-bound, cover-engraved, filled with drop caps and illustrations so sharp and etched they seem to be line-drawn by a draftsman's pen -- and consider their value as objects against a file on your eReader, a file which can be reproduced endlessly by the publisher and not at all by the owner, even though the very device on which you read your file will stop working years (and perhaps centuries) before the physical book disintegrates.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Because my house became full of books - double-stacked shelves on every available wall. To buy more books I would have had to buy a larger house. For me personally, eBooks are worth FAR more than paper books, because I can store an essentially unlimited number of them on an external drive the size of a pack of playing cards. Naturally I remove the DRM as soon as I buy a book (and I typically buy 4 or 5 books a week).
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