Quote:
Originally Posted by numtini
 Someone actually read the article!
This isn't about what is right, it isn't about what is moral, it isn't about what is profitable, it's about what is real. The easy availability of music, ebooks, and video from the pirate market is not subject to debate. It is a constant, not a variable. It's there. It's always going to be there unless you want a society that makes 1984 look libertarian.
What the article concerns itself with is that most readers, viewers, listeners, etc have no problem with paying for material. We just want it to be reasonable and given the constant that piracy will exist, if publishers don't offer it on reasonable terms, the market will push people to simply pirate it.
What do consumers want?
Universal availability--ie, we want everything to be available and are not going to accept that some things aren't available in digital format--Harry Potter may very well be the 'gateway drug' to ebook piracy.
Reasonable pricing--People expect an electronic version to be cheaper than something that involves a physical object and supply chain to produce and distribute it. That is perfectly reasonable. And geezus on a popsicle stick, it can't be more expensive than the physical item. You can't tell me I have to pay $9.99 for a book that is available for $6.95 in mass market paper then tell me I'm getting a bargain because the hardcover is $25.
An understanding that we aren't going to have to buy something repeatedly or go through a huge honking deal if we switch devices. That is sort of a DRM question, but sort of not at the same time. People don't care about DRM, they don't know about DRM. What they care about is not having to buy a new book when they get a new reader. If the industry settled on one form of file and drm that would work as well, but it hasn't happened. (That might very well be the issue upon which the "information wants to be free" and consumer markets part on. Consumers don't care about DRM as a rights or technology issue, they care about portability and ease of use--make it invisible and they won't care.) |
And that is the economic window that is open and will be for a long time.
The competition between time/risk/quality of the "darknet" vis a vis the price/convenience/quality of a commercial product will place a cap on what can be charged for a e-book, just like it has formed a cap on music.
The current idea is to charge a high price, make it inconvenient in the name of piracy (DRM), and then provide a low quality product is an absolute recipe for failure. (I'm not talking about you, Steve!)
Will this be enough to maintain a flow of new titles? I don't know. The biggest problem against new titles is not piracy, but the sudden influx of readily available old titles. Unless you are reading ebook tied to current events, which a flow of new titles is imperative, dies it really matter if the title is absolutely new, or merely new to you? Over a 100,000 titles have been produced in the last 100 years. Have you read them all?
I haven't. If you think Project Gutenberg is not a big threat to modern publishing, you haven't thought it through. And it's perfectly legal. There are nearly 30,00 titles. If I read a book a day for 70 years, I would only read 25,568 books. (1 book x 365.25 days per year X 70 years = 25,567.25) In other words I could read just Project Gutenberg for my entire life and never run out of free material to read. And that's despite, draconian changes in copyright over the last 40 years trying to prevent things from falling into the public domain. Just imaging where the competition from legal free would be if the 1976 copyright revision had not gone into and everything from 1953 on back were public domain...