Quote:
Originally Posted by acidzebra
Well, you can produce a zillion ebooks at zero cost simply by copying but without a reader device you won't get any use from them, so when comparing the cost of e vs. p it seems reasonable to factor in the devices you need to render them useful in any way.
Don't shoot me, I didn't go on about the "scientific" stuff.
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Not really, you cant produce a zillion ebooks by copying alone. You also have to distribute the copies to a zillion people. Having a zillion copies of an ebook on your hard drive is equivalent to having one.
My point was that ebook devices are part of the infrastructure of ebooks, just as printing presses are part of the infrastructure of pbooks. What does it mean to be "infrastructure"? It means that the cost of producing the infrastructure grows very slowly with the number of books being produced. For example, if you build a printing press your additional "infrastructural" cost of producing the pbook will not change until you reach the capacity of the printing press.
Non infrastructural costs are things like paper, ink and fuel (for ditribution) that increase with every new pbook produced
and distributed. For ebooks non infrastructural costs are almost zero (basically tiny additional capacity on the internet and storage space on your hard drive).