Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
Ah but when I buy an ebook I'm using my ink and my page (i.e. the ereader) so why should I have to pay more for the ebook version than I would if I were to buy a paper and ink version of the same book? That's the main crux of the problem for many of us I think.
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I agree that it makes sense for ebooks to cost less than print books but we live in a capitalist system and free enterprise works by letting sellers try to get the highest price they can and buyers try to get the lowest price. Hopefully things level out. It doesn't always work and sometimes when it does work sometimes it takes a while. It does work a lot of the time though and that's about the best we can hope for.
Ebooks are still pretty new as mainstream and the publishers are resisting them with high prices. Their goal isn't so much as to make a lot on ebooks as to make us buy print books. Their problem is that if we all buy ebooks at lower prices they'll start making less money and nobody wants to make less money.
My hope is that this will level out in time as ebooks become more common.
An interesting parallel to this can be found in Booth Tarkington's 1919 Novel "The Magnificent Ambersons" when cars were just beginning to be popular and how they were resisted. It's a fascinating story. It's also the second ever Pulitzer Prize winner and it's well worth reading.
By the way, you can almost see another parallel in early online communication, in the days before the internet. When I bought my first 300 baud modem in the 1970s Ma Bell charged $50 a month surcharge simply to connect a modem to a phone line. Anyone caught not paying had their phone service disconnected permanently. I never knew this to happen to anyone but the phone company's literature made it very plain. I also never knew any private individual who paid it. There was no easy way for the phone company to tell.
Barry