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Originally Posted by HarryT
No, it's about your personal perception of what constitutes fairness, which may not tally with other people's.
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It's not my personal perception, if I am not alone in it.
You can make fairness as complicated as you like, but I don't buy into the arguments given, and believe that at its root the fairness is quite simply based.
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You're suggesting, if I understand you correctly, that it's "not fair" for a publisher to charge the same for an ebook and a DTP, because the ebook costs less to produce. The reality is that book prices are determined by what the market will bear, not (primarily) by overheads. A publisher has a right - indeed, a legal duty to their shareholders - to engage in legal commercial practices which maximise their profit.
If optimal profits result from charging £5 for an ebook, it would be foolish to sell it for £4. There will always be a correlation between price and sales, and publishers have decades - centuries, in some cases - of experience in determining what price point will maximise their income.
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In other words, you are saying they will charge what they think they can get away with.
You are saying, that the profit they were getting before ebooks came along, was sufficient (must have been), but now they are taking advantage of ebooks to get more.
Just because they can get away with something in the market, does not make it fair, especially when the product is a monopoly really.