Quote:
Originally Posted by Barty
I just did.
I got a pbook from my library and after struggling with the hard to read font and having to handle a physical book for a day I bit the bullet and bought the kindle version for $9.99. Pretty stiff price for a backlist published in '92, but sometimes the heart wants what it wants. (I wonder how I managed to do much reading before e-readers.)
The consensus feeling on MR seems to be the zero margin cost of ebooks and their non transferability mean they should cost less than paper books, but for me ebooks are just better -- at least for narrative fiction (as opposed to, say, text books, technical manuals, references). I'm just happy the publishers are not able to price discriminate against people like me, due to above sentiment and, well, the fact that if they charge too much for ebooks it would just drive more people to piracy.
At this point, the pbooks lovers are essentially subsidizing the book industry for me, which is great :-)
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Given that I have pbooks dating back to the 70's and that I've been replacing pbooks with ebooks as the backlist becomes available, I frequently pay more for an ebook than the original pbook. A number of my pbooks from the 70's cost less than a dollar new.
I don't know about consensus feeling. Certainly there is a group of posters who think that ebooks should be cheaper than pbooks. There is also a group of posters who seem to think that ebooks should be free or near free and anything else is stealing from the readers and another group that seems to think that ebooks should be priced at the same price as the current pbook price and finally a group that doesn't seem to care all that much what the price is. I'm sure there are others. Any appearance of consensus is probably more from one group being more vocal in the voicing their opinion than anything else.