Quote:
Originally Posted by PKFFW
The value, I would argue, is in the reading of the book and not in the 1's and 0's. To claim the copy is valueless is just plain wrong in my opinion. If it was truly valueless then there would be no desire to read the book at all. The person who wants to read the book must place some value on doing so otherwise they wouldn't want to read it.
Just because they can get it for free doesn't mean it is valueless to them. Why should they not be required to pay some fair price for the priviledge?
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Here it is!!!!!!!!!!!
The value is in the READING, not in the file!
So, I go back to my previuos example:
Suppose you pay an amount for a total unlimited access to every ebook in the whole world for a period of time, with the only constraint of a non-share agreement.
How many ebooks do you own?
How much is it worth?
Some say you've got millions of books, and the monetary value of it is in the billions.
I don't think so.
I think you "own" just the books you read, and the value is given by the multiplication of your reading rate and the mean street price of a book.
Something in the thousands of dollars.
And you'll actually "own" a few hudred ebooks.
The ebooks you bought are still available to me, or potentially to every other reader in the world. The value of the ebooks you downloaded and din't read in the "subscription period", is exactly zero. They have a cost, of course, but actually no real value, unless you're a file hoarder...
That does not apply to printed books, of course: if you own a copy of a book, I cannot have it in the same time.
And therefore they have a physical value.
How much are you willing to pay for the ability to access every single book in the digital world?
Of course it's not easy at all to implement such a vision into a working business model. An effective way to compensate the authors you actually read has to be put in place; and the "no share agreement" has to be enforced someway (that's easier, even without DRM and Hadopis, once the idea of "copy" has been erased...). And the printed books have to be included in the model (e.g. including them in the subscription, and charging "per copy" just for the manifacturing costs*...).
It's even more difficult to find an appropriate way to charge for th eservice. Not everybody can pay everything in advance... A income-proportional fee may sound a bit socialist, but I think it's fair: the whelty pays for part of the poor's education and entertainment...
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* Just for the thought of it. If you have to buy a "book card", for the unlimited access stated above, and you have to show it to librarires, newsstands, comic books dealers, etc... you won't access darknet ebook sharing to find what you're looking for. You just download it openly and legally. The card limitation is just in time.