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Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
1. That charging too much is for a thing is a traditional and time-honored mode of capitalism and various levels of excess should be tolerated because you don't mind paying more personally and/or the practice is already common.
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Charging more than the item costs to produce is called "profit", and is the very basis of capitalism, of course. At what point does "making profit" turn into "charging too much"? Isn't that a purely subjective determination? If a publisher charges £10 for an eBook, and I'm willing to pay £12, then for me, they are not charging too much. If you're only willing to pay £8, though, then for you they are charging too much.
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Counter: Pricing eBooks higher than paperbacks due to greater convenience has no parallel model. Mp3s are never priced higher than CDs -- they are impermanent and lossy -- and there is an equivalent loss of advanced formatting and image resolution whether an individual book uses either or not. Pictures universally look worse. Complex layouts are ultimately impractical for the moment. If the original is in color, then the eBook either is not or cannot be seen that way (at least on a pre-Mirasol eInk screen). Even devices that allow for color layouts do not offer the resolution and clarity of a physical book.
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But are eBooks priced higher than paperbacks? I've never seen an example of a publisher's recommended retail price for a paperback being lower than that same publisher's retail price for the equivalent eBook. Do you have an example of such a situation? I generally find the opposite - that even though the eBook is subject to VAT and the paper book isn't, the eBook is still somewhat cheaper than the paper book.
What can happen, of course, is that a particular retail may choose to discount a paper book so that it becomes cheaper than the eBook, but it's not the publisher who's doing so.