Quote:
Originally Posted by spindlegirl
I certainly wouldn't say "a buck for every book", but I do think that $10 is kind of steep for an archived digital file of someone who died ten years ago, especially a DRM-sick one. Lower the backlist prices, take away the DRM so the book is mine for real, and I'd personally pay $4-7 dollars. (This is roughly what I pay when I am not reading free or library loans)
But the quality has to totally rock. There are some books I bought when I first got my Kobo (I now use at T1), of which I have also seen pirated copies. (No I do not approve of piracy) Guess which copy looks and presents better? I'd even pay $10 for a really trendy book - if I could, without question, take it as a given that the quality would be DRM-free and really amazing
|
Good thing most mainstream buyers don't think like you , or the book industry would collapse.
You are new around these parts, SG, so you probably don't understand that the issues of ebook prices and DRM have been debated to death.
Suffice it say that as Scalzi put it, ebooks aren't special snowflakes. They don't make the the price of authorial talent go away, or of proof reading, or of editing, or every other cost of making a book, except printing and distribution- and that's not a huge percentage of the total cost. Its almost certainly less than 20 percent. It ain't 50 or 70 percent and even the most died in the wool ebook enthusiasts admit that.
To paraphrase a famous economist, it is not by the benevolence of the author, the editor, or the publisher that we get our evening's entertainment , but their regard to their self interest. You make it not worth their while to produce new books, and there will be no more new books-including no more new library books and no more new used books.
OK, strike that- there will be new ebooks, but they will be of the Smashwords type-typically, badly written, badly formatted, badly edited books put out by hopeful amateurs. Nothing wrong with that, but I and most traditional buyers aspire to and will pay for better than that .