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Originally Posted by Liviu_5
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
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I'll confess, I have no idea what you are on about with the taxes. I live in the EU so am totally unfamiliar with your Amazon bill, and I pay with cash a lot. But when I buy something in a store with or without cash, there is still VAT on the items I buy - it is included in the price. Maybe I misunderstand.
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Originally Posted by Liviu_5
So the assumptions above are way too simplistic to discuss things based on them.
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Well, it is a model. A very simple model I agree, but it is not meant to be ultra-realistic. We have three, possibly four groups of people. People who pay (/are prepared to pay) for the majority of the media they consume, people who do not pay (/are not prepared to pay) for the majority of the media they consume, people who dip into both wells so to speak, and thanks to Neko, people who "know not what they do". We can look at technologies like DRM, and broadly estimate/make wild guesses about how it will impact each group and how something will/will not alter their behavior. If you have a better model, by all means.
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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.
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I agree fully there - this is why I argued earlier that treating the pirated books like a market separate from the ebook market and the pbook market makes sense - you can't compete on price there, as pirated works are typically available for free. There are a lot of other ways to compete, but trying to lock down your content and make it inconvenient for people is probably a Very Bad Idea.