Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
Actually, price if only half of the equation. The other half is ease of piracy. Before the advent of ebooks, pbooks were not widely pirated. This suggests that their price was "correct". But if you ask the average consumer if they're rather pay $25 for a hardback or $1 for a pirated hardback that was just as good, they'd chose the $1 one. The problem is, you can't make pirated hardbacks for $1.
Ebooks allow you to make ebook copies for $1. $0, really, if it's already in ebook form. So that's why publishers use DRM and try to shut down torrents. If you insist on ebooks being easily copyable, then publishers will have to compete on price with the $0 pirated ebook... and no one knows whether that's possible or not. There's some evidence that enough people will pay $1 or even $5 for an official ebook over a $0 pirated one, but we have no way of knowing if the industry can profit at that price point.
Convenience also plays a role... even though pirated ebooks are free, the average consumer is not computer savvy enough to know how to get them. Legal action from publishers forces distributors of pirated ebooks not to advertise themselves openly on most websites with simple one-click downloads.
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So far, efforts of different mediums of content that was pirated previously (video and audio) seem to demonstrate it is possible to compete with piracy. I have in mind Hulu for video and the iTunes store for music. Hopefully something similar can happen with books. The reasons are very much what you said, ease of use for non tech savvy user and a "guarantee" of quality (for some reason the official thing looks more appealing; probably the source of the "you get what you pay for" mentality and some sort of mental bias). I think in order to compete, though, prices must also be lowered significantly, so in the end I think this benefits readers either way; they can get the pirated content for free or a convenient and cheap service.