Quote:
Originally Posted by Ceili
I came to my reader from paperback books. I'm not a fan of hard cover and rarely found a book that I couldn't wait for to come out in pb. With that in mind, 10 bucks for a book is more than I'm willing to pay most of the time.
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I came to my Sony Reader from a love of books and a desire to be able to carry multiple books with me everywhere so I could read as often as possible.
I am a fan of hardcover books for books that I want as permanent members of my library and that I hope to hand down to my grandchildren for their enjoyment. I view ebooks as disposable books, that is, read them and delete them.
I am willing to pay for a hardcover book. In fact, I recently added to my library
Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame (published February 2009 by Johns Hopkins University Press), which is a 2-volume set that has a list price of $125. I wouldn't even consider buying this work as an ebook (assuming it were available as one) because this is an important book that is not a disposable book to my way of thinking.
Conversely, I am unwilling to pay -- as a general rule; there are exceptions -- more than $8 for an ebook because of the limitations imposed on them.
If there were a standard format that all devices could read and
if I could freely transfer purchases among devices like I can freely transfer my hardcover books,
then I would be willing to pay a higher price for an ebook.
I don't insist that publishers lower their pricing for ebooks. Rather, my gripe is less pricing than DRM and no standard format. If I do not like a book's price, I simply do not buy it. I assume that market forces will come to bear and if enough people do not buy a book because the price is too high, then the price ultimately will be lowered. If it isn't lowered, it doesn't matter -- there are lots of books appropriately priced by less-known authors that provide excellent reads.