Quote:
Originally Posted by carlobee
this is so true. makes me think about the law of supply and demand during my Economics class when I was still in college.
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I was reminded of the same thing but I’ve recently been reading the book
Animal Spirits by Akerlof & Shiller. They take a look at the current international economic crisis from a Keynesian perspective, and one of the failures of the “invisible hand of the marketplace” thinking behind our present debacle, which they see essentially as a mirror of the 1930s event and due to the same causes, is the importance of fairness (to me that means justice) when it comes to setting prices and wages.
For whatever reasons, people just don’t think it’s fair to have to pay a high price for a device to read books, and they are especially outraged when they are then charged as much or more for eBooks than the paper equivalent.
The justice behind portable music players and portable book readers is an unequal comparison: you can get paper books free from the library or at greatly reduced prices at used book stores, or simply borrow one.
I think the survey shows that most people think buying a book reader only starts to be fair at prices below $100. If you consider fairness, this survey fails to go far enough: how do the people in this sample react when confronted with the fact that there is less material available for book readers, and what there is comes at a higher price than for the same books on paper? And then they learn that the local library doesn’t have any eBooks to loan? And then they learn that DRM makes it impossible to sell their eBooks? Or even loan them to a friend?
There are still many hurdles for acceptance of eBooks to overcome. I believe firmly that this technology is something the world needs so the effort to overcome it all does matter, but I think this [published] portion of the survey doesn't address too many important parts of the puzzle to reach any real conclusion.