Quote:
Originally Posted by Dumas
The textbook industry's resistance to the application of new technology hinges on their belief that the free market cannot function with a lack of scarcity. It is not difficult to see why publishers would feel threatened ... it's how they've been doing business since Gutenberg and before. Their current business model is based on a desire to force scarcity where there is none, just so the economics they are accustomed to can continue to be based on the principle of scarcity.
I think the inability to get rid of scarcity thinking lies at the root of this discussion, not copyright.
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I'm sorry, but I really can't agree with you.
If a publisher decides that, in order to make it economically viable to publish a textbook, they need to generate revenues of $100,000 from it, and they know that only 1000 people are likely to buy it, they have to get $100 per customer. The point about textbooks is that they are of very restricted interest - you won't sell more copies of a molecular biology textbook if you reduce the price from $100 to $20, because the average "man in the street" doesn't give a damn about the subject and wouldn't want the book if you were to give it away free. For the people who actually need it, they'll still need it whether the price is $20 or $100.
It IS a scenario where there is genuine (not artificial!) "scarcity", but the scarcity is the size of the customer base, not the number of books available to sell to them.