Quote:
Originally Posted by Timboli
[...] And sorry to disagree, but I have never seen fair as arbitrary. Sure, you need to weigh up each case, but some things are bleeding obvious, or should be. Any arbitrariness is in the mind of those applying such.
[...]
Never said otherwise.
But I will say there are degrees of capitalism, and I am not a fan of capitalism that goes too far and impinges on Democracy and ultimately fairness.
I believe in boundaries to behavior and how you treat others, and especially in society, which was created for all. If you are filthy rich, society made you so and so you owe it, as you would be nothing without it ... too many forget that and think its all their own doing. It's called greed and taking advantage of others.
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So, despite the fact that I would characterise most of your posts on this thread as complaining that the price of ebooks is unfair, you are not actually expecting our system of economics to produce fairness in pricing. Okay, although it's not the way I interpreted your previous posts. And we still have a gaping hole: what is fair? (And why are you a better arbiter of it than publishers?)
You say "some things are bleeding obvious"; well, I'm missing the bleeding obvious. How can a fair price for any book be determined that isn't - for the most part - quite arbitrary?
Cents per word might seem tempting, but I have been happy to pay hardback prices for some authors, but wouldn't accept freebies from some others.
Some reasonable income for the author and publisher might sound good, but there will always be some books that are more popular than others, and popularity is not related to the amount of work that went into production - so how can that be fair?
The big publishers probably come closest because they have the benchmark of paper books from which to start, and the advantages of scale to provide cost effectiveness across many books even when some sell better than others. And they also have a long history over which they have learned what readers in general will and will not accept (and we're talking all readers, not just the select few ebook specialists here on MR).
If readers (as averaged by what the publishers see, but you don't) will accept the price then I suspect that is about as close as we're ever going to get to fair (but isn't really) - after all, they don't have to pay that price. Books are luxury, people can choose not to pay new release prices; it should not even be a hardship, it's not like is a shortage of public domain books. Current prices seem to offer strong evidence that enough people think the prices are fair (or close enough to fair) to sustain those prices.
And note that even with that being true, I still say the result is arbitrary. What readers are willing to spend on new books is partly dependent on what else is available (video, music, social networking, public domain books), and how much free income they have (which is dependent on their level of debt etc. etc.). There is nothing in here anywhere that says anything about the length of the book, the quality of the writing, the editing, the cover and so on. The price of a book is independent of the book's production effort. Fairness simply isn't part of the equation.