Quote:
Originally Posted by acidzebra
Assumptions:
1 honest consumers buy all their goods
2 pirates, um, pirate all their goods
3 there is some overlap and some edge cases, let's call them semi-honest.
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Here I disagree somewhat - first of all this ideal notion of *honest consumer* does not exist. If there was such a *mythical beast* NYS for example would not need to pass the Amazon bill to force Amazon and others to collect - legally due - online taxes.
You may disagree philosophically with taxes, online taxes and what not, but if you take the view that the law is the law, so there is such a thing as *honest consumer* you have to deal with that - and for people in Europe and other places where they impose VAT on ebooks, I would urge them to think at how many time they did cash business to avoid VAT - from what I read in various studies lots of people do that at one time or another and statistics are statistics so to speak, so with all due respect and not intending offense, I do not believe saints congregate in one place online...
Second, a lot is a matter of price - where by that I mean both $ price, but ease of acquiring, utility, ease of use... And here drm for example adds to difficulty of use, sometimes dramatically so, sometimes less, but the big gripe for me is price.
After all even with my hate of (nonconvertible with ease) drm I bought recently 2 pdf drm e-books for 3-4$ since the print book is comparatively too expensive (at 15$ or more) and I am resigned with the idea that they will not be readable in a year, two, five if I am lucky - unless I take the 20-30 minutes to snag the pages from my screen in an image book to be ocr'ed... which I ain't going to bother for those books.
But those are special cases and if they were say 8 or 9$ each I would have balked and waited for the print to drop in price as used or simply read something else.
So the assumptions above are way too simplistic to discuss things based on them.