Quote:
Originally Posted by ezdiy
My rant is indeed biased towards ebook market, and its sorry state of ridiculous pricing pretty much killing it. Print is a kind of different can of worms, as the audience for dead trees is far bigger - for now. If we were to draw comparison to music again, we're in 99 - napster exists, mp3s are kinda shitty and low bitrate, and far more people simply buy cds still, mostly because everyone is on expensive dialup (e-readers are kinda huge upfront investment).
Pirate scans indeed don't register all that much in grand scheme of things once we abandon the ebook context, though there are notable exceptions (such as textbooks or journals).
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For the most part, eBook pricing matches paper pricing, so I don't really consider it ridiculous. It's only ridiculous if you assume that eBook ought to cost less because the cost of printing adds a lot, yet the data I've seen says that printing is a fairly small component of a book's price.
One thing to consider is that demographics for the big music consumers tends to be very different than the demographics for the big book consumers.
Looking at the Pew research survey, only 15% of Americans read more than 20 books a year, something that is has been fairly constant since 2011. I think it would be interesting to know what the percentage of big readers read ebooks verses audiobooks verses paper. I would also be interested in seeing the demographics of the big reader group. Last, I would say that I suspect that the Pew research survey does not capture the kids market very well.