Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
I thought your first 3 paragraphs were excellent and made some good points. However, I find that I can't really discuss your last paragraph in any meaningful way without crossing the line into politics. Perhaps a good illustration of one of the points you made. This whole topic reeks of politics.
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Since much was snipped in the time I wasn't on the forum, it's difficult to respond to replies that I can't read wholly, nor can I always understand the full reply without the bits excised. Sorry for that. To be fair, the title of the topic is pricing and
policies - and it's quite difficult to have a discussion on matters of policy without at least brushing on some political issues, but, I get that it's been decided as outside the scope of this thread, and I'm okay with it. I do, however, find it ironic that political positions can remain strongly implied, and even outright injected into statements about the issues at hand, as long as the political underpinnings remain unnamed and not discussed openly. Hopefully, if we cannot discuss them, we might at least acknowledge the fact that it is so and move on. Hopefully, this remark won't be stricken as politicking...
To tie into (some of your) subsequent posts, I would agree that there is an individual sliding scale of preferences that might impact how much one person is willing to pay for a book, and that it is overwhelmingly subjective. I would also agree that books are still the most democratic and cheapest art form we can engage in. Technically, between Internet Archive, Open Library, OverDrive and Gutenberg, a good portion of it is often completely free. You can't beat that. What I would still argue is that
subjectivity alone is not a good enough principle for pricing, simply because it never gives us the whole picture. Excluding flea markets, the final price of an item is never simply what one is willing to pay for it based on one's subjective liking.
There are differences between institution-based valuations and industrial valuations. Consider fine art. Artists that have had exhibitions at famous venues are worth more that those that have not, just as two hundred years or so ago, "academic" painters were priced accordingly, and considered the only real painters because they were trained at an academy. How many hours of enjoyment should one get from
Salvator Mundi for it to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars? In contrast, paper books have always had a fine art component to them (first editions, bibliophile printings, etc.), as well as an industrial manufacture component (the printing press itself, paperbacks, etc.) In the book world, we've seen Great Books snobs, Harvard five-foot "shelfers", folks that read "only" hard Sci-Fi, and a myriad of other phenomena. Where do e-books fit in?
Now consider a less lofty example. McDonald's tries very hard to keep the burgers or whatever at a constant fixed price, because that's a threshold that's been established by them or by other forces, and they don't dare disappoint. Is the raw component value of the ingredients worth more or less than 99 cents, despite inflation? Is the nutrient value obtained equal or better than 99 cents worth of some other food? Is the, ehm, taste commensurate to the price tag? Haven't similar forces influenced pricing in the (e)book world? Have they already been fixed, or are they still malleable? If they are malleable, what forces determine the prices, other than, folks are willing to spend their cash. Rather than arguing for or against any policy, I think it's good and fruitful to discuss how and why such invisible barriers come into effect.
I think a lot of people seem to be ignoring the institutional power, ease and availability of "vetted" marketplaces, which most always function on a massive scale. In that regard, in the time the few of us here have been discussing the issues, outlining our reasoning and giving examples and arguments, an untold number of folks bought an untold number of books. Most people have an impulsive streak to purchasing a few dollars' worth of virtual items easily delivered within seconds, and it's them that we are discussing, far more than head-cases like us, because they are driving the market. The type of person who would tweak their reader is much more likely to be the kind of person to think about what kind of price they're getting, much more likely to shop around and be aware of price differences, if nothing else. That, too, is worth considering.