Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaime_Astorga
So far, efforts different mediums of content that was pirated previously (video and audio) seem to demonstrate it is possible to compete with piracy. I have Hulu for video and the iTunes store for music in mind. 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.
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Really the adaptation of music and video demonstrate both that legitimate providers have advantages that compensate for the free alternative (mainly legitimacy itself) and that market realities (i.e. the emergence of a filesharing black market) effectively counteract the inertia of old media institutions.