Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
And just to make this clear: I'm not talking about pricing ebooks at the level of bargain-bin cut-out paperbacks. I'm talking about pricing editions of new books proportionately in all formats, with the ebook versions slightly cheaper (at the very least) than their printed counterparts, and frequent promotional sales at the publisher's marketing level to get people in the habit of reading them enough to make them popular in the first place.
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This is the part that puzzles me. The argument that ebooks should be cheaper is premised on the fact that the costs associated with the production and distribution of ebooks are less than those associated with pbooks. I'm willing to take that as given - ebooks cost less to produce than pbooks. More precisely, the marginal copy of an ebook costs nothing other than miniscule bandwidth to produce and distribute, whereas the marginal copy of the pbook costs more to produce and distribute.
But why should the cost of production and distribution have anything to do with the price, other than that the price should be greater than that cost? In a normal market, the "fair" price is that price which the buyer is willing to pay that produces the greatest profit for the seller.
I'm willing to agree with the argument that the public is entitled to a better deal than that produced by the normal market, since the book market involves a time-limited monopoly granted by law to the seller. What I don't get is why anyone should believe that the price of a pbook version and that of an ebook version of the same book should bear any particular relationship to each other. Why shouldn't a paperback version be cheaper than an electronic version?
I can easily imagine a situation where a publisher would price the hardback higher than the ebook (due to the beauty and permanence of the hardback,) the ebook less but still higher than the paperback (due to the portability of the ebook) and the paperback less than either (since it's a one-read throwaway.)
And let me tell you, I would be far happier paying twice as much for Infinite Jest in ebook form than in any pbook form, assuming that the footnotes were workable.