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Originally Posted by Moejoe
The problem is that the vast majority of the digital audience don't share the same ideas about time=money. The fact that it might have taken the author five years to write their book means nothing to the downloader, it does not fit into the equation any longer when they come to make a choice from the swathe of products before them. That fact is background noise, and is especially unimportant with an audience who are schooled in the ideas of creative commons, open source and the information=free philosophies.
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I'd like to see how these same people felt about their boss saying your time doesn't equal money to me. How would they feel if he said "I don't care if it takes you 1, 2 or 3 hours to make something for me, I can only sell it for $5 so I'm only paying you $2."
I'm pretty sure their tune would change.
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Originally Posted by Moejoe
Lets take as an example the amount of books that are offered every day on Mobileread for zero cost or near to zero cost (<$1). Any book now offered over these magical price points is probably going to get ignored, unless it has something more to offer. We're already at a point where zero or near-to-zero price points are becoming expected for new authors, established authors in digital format seem to get a pass for the most part, but even this is changing. A lot of avid readers refuse to pay the price-point the publishers/stores set on established authors books. They (we) do not value the digital product the same as the physical product. This is the inescapable fact of all this. Digital, because it is infinitely reproducible, has no starting worth. It begins at zero and you must add value from thereon in. Saying it took five years to write and all the rest doesn't mean anything to the end customer when they can go to Gutenberg or Feedbooks and snatch themselves a classic or new work of fiction for ZERO COST.
it's all a value proposition now. I can't remember who said it, but it was linked to in a recent MR posting, and it was a talk about the future of publishing. The speaker said something along the lines of "Product is dead, it's not about the product anymore but the context." By which he was talking of the community in which the product is offered, the value that the individual community put upon the object/information being offered. Its easy to value a pbook, there's a definitive process that must be undertaken and it has set costs at each stage. With a digital product there is no way to make the same value assumptions. Server costs/hosting? What if it's using P2P technology for distribution? What if it sits on a free blog host like wordpress, or one of the many new digital book outlets such as Feedbooks? What if it only took a weekend to write (famously the classic Incredible Shrinking Man by Richard Matherson was written in one weekend, also On the Road by Jack Kerouac).
You can't make a value assumption over a non-physical object, and the audience certainly wont make this judgement. It's the context of the object not the object itself that has worth now.
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What about the value that comes from the reading?
It's all very well and good to argue that it's all about value and to argue that you(not you personally but a "general" you) aren't going to pay based on the time spent creating. However, if you are going to argue that then by rights you should argue that if you really really enjoy the book then you should be willing to pay alot for it right? I mean the value you gained from the book is very high since you thoroughly enjoyed it and will have those memories forever. If we do away with DRM you could also say then that you have the book forever to re-read, onsell etc as well so that should add further value right?
Can't really see that happening though, can you? I'm pretty sure the arguement will stop at the "I don't care how long it took or how much effort it took to write" part.
Cheers,
PKFFW