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Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Neko, although I think you've nailed most of the points, I would not pay hardcover price for an e-edition of a book when it first comes out.
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I would be willing to pay if I actually got the hardcover, maybe. But I've kind of moved on from this thinking myself. In the other thread I said the price probably ought to be more like the used book price (HC during the HC phase of publication, I suppose, stupid though that is, PB the rest of the time). It's certainly not that I think of eBooks as "only as good as used books," whatever that might mean, I just think it could be useful for publishers to think this way.
Bob's scenario in which scanning becomes quick and easy enough that lots of people are doing it and it starts to drive the eBook market seems plausible to me. Traditional publishers probably won't move much until they see a threat to existing sales. Unfortunately, their first reaction is likely to be a knee-jerk "sue the scanners" impulse. I don't look forward to that part. But hopefully we can all move past that to something more sensible soon.
Question for you all: if I'm willing to send in my paperback book -- or perhaps the front cover, so that it can't legally be resold-- what should be a reasonable price for an eBook replacement? I've got an awful lot of books here, and I'd be happy to "compress" most of them to digital format, if there were a legal path to do so.
(Secondary question: if a company vowed to pulp the originals afterward, would it be legal to accept books to digitize them for their original owners only? I know this would vary country-by-country, I'm just wondering what the range of opinions is out there.)