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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
At bookfinder.com I'm finding this for $9.76 new in hardcover, or $5.74 for a new paperback.
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So you are showing the ebook is even more overpriced than the original comparison ($12.78 compared to $87.00 makes the price gouging look even worse). When I did a search involving shipment to Canada, BookFinder came up with $21.80 as the lowest cost with standard shipping to Canada and $200.01 (from Books Express via Biblio.co.uk -- thanks for the chuckle) as the highest. By comparison, Chapters/Indigo has the book for $24.57.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
That's only true if the person purchasing the 350 pbooks isn't worrying about the cost of housing those books, perhaps because the capital budget is someone else's problem.
Or it could be that they discard one older book for each paper book they buy. As someone who often reads books published 20 - 50 years ago, I don't like that. I think there should be a value given to the loss of the opportunity to read the older book.
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Libraries do discard books on a regular basis. Some due to the poor condition of the pbook, other times due to needing the space and the book having no loans over a time period (in the case I have some knowledge of, a hardcover has to sit on the shelf for a minimum of 5 years) though most of those end up in a for sale bin. Other books will be moved into inactive storage from which a patron can still request a loan though it may take a couple of days for the book to be made available.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
One of the many advantages of leasing an eBook is that the library doesn't have to choose between physical expansion and deaccessioning.
I'm not saying that the eBook lease is always a good buy. I am saying that I've never seen a plausible cost comparison.
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Whereas the price comparisons I've seen and discussed with library staff members are that a hardcover pbook averages about 42% of the cost of an ebook. We'll leave out the fixed life of an ebook either in time or loan count. And since the library pays the same for salaries, etc., those costs are pretty much a non-player in discussing post-purchase costs.