Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Do you believe that it's justifiable to illegally download a book, simply because you consider it to be too expensive?
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I believe Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans have far more justification than anyone else to do so.
If the publishers say 'readers, [profane language edit - moderation] you, wear these massive price hikes' then obviously the response will be greatly increased snagging for free.
Or buying it from the Americans, because this is mostly driven by the poms. Australian readers would have been better off if the yanks took over and crushed the poms, because books would be cheaper because the rump publishing offshoots here would then be American with their book prices as the baseline.
And here, the dead tree prices have actually come down a little, because of forced competition.....so there is zero justification for large price rises.
Now, of course, trying to protect the remaining Australian bookshops is a different story - because if there aren't any then dead tree middlemen are not required and most of the large publisher jobs here could be removed.
'Reprinting' (e.g. putting sticker on, often) a book in small numbers is very economically inefficient. Retailers could buy paperbacks from The Book Depository at $6 rather than the $12 or whatever the local version wants to charge them. And get them several weeks faster than at the moment, too!
And obviously foreign ebooks in their original language need zero input from other countries.