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Originally Posted by zacheryjensen
I don't know anyone who feels the slightest guilt at making a copy of a CD for a friend.
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Sure. But let's not forget we're also in an era where Jane Doe in Anytown USA can share her entire music collection with millions of her closest Internet Buddies.
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Originally Posted by zacheryjensen
I think it's ridiculous that communication and storytelling is such a huge industry as it is. I think it's ridiculous to make business models based around ARTIFICIAL SUPPLY CONSTRAINTS.
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It isn't. It's a business model based around the reality that it takes a fair amount of resources to write and distribute a book, even in an electronic format.
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Originally Posted by zacheryjensen
If you modeled the perception of paying for the copying process of pbooks to the same work for ebooks, of course nobody is going to think an ebook should cost anywhere near as much as a pbook. They know very well it costs almost nothing to make a 2mb file copy, even over the internet.
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Then their "knowledge" is flat wrong. In most cases, an ebook only costs 10-12% less to make than a paper book.
Why? Because whether in paper or electronic form, costs include: Author's advance and royalties; research; editing; proofreading; design and layout; agents' fees; legal fees; marketing and PR; international costs (e.g. translations and rights); retailer's cut; payment processing costs; customer service; taxes; and other overhead costs for publishers and retailers.
Most books don't even make a profit, it's the blockbusters that pay the bills.
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Originally Posted by zacheryjensen
Nobody is worried about how much time and effort went into creating a book except for the hard core literates out there.
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That's nice, but it doesn't make the fundamental costs of producing and selling books go away.
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Originally Posted by zacheryjensen
the industry has to completely indoctrinate the non-ownership ideal to the whole book-buying market, including your grandmothers who are older than currently copyright law.
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Originally Posted by zacheryjensen
Still... I'd much rather have the pay-for library model. I don't care about owning a book or not. I just want to read it once.
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I have no problem with you having that approach to reading -- for yourself -- but it's a very narrow vision. Plenty of people (including yours truly) re-read books, or read large books that take a great deal of time to finish. You really need to account for a variety of reading styles and reader's behavior when developing a theory of how to make over an entire industry....
Besides, subscription services for electronic goods are not always a home run. Netflix may do fairly well, but Rhapsody has not taken the market by storm. I don't necessarily object to a subscription service, but I don't think you will change enough people's minds on it to make it work. I suspect it would also be a contractual nightmare, since all the contracts would need to be re-written (again...) to cover subscription royalties.
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Originally Posted by zacheryjensen
One thing is for sure. All of this nonsense, battling over pricing and rights, and anti-consumer practices like DRM and format-based pricing disparities. It all makes me wish there were more Cory Doctorows and Peter Wattses in the world. It makes me quite grateful for project gutenberg and feedbooks.
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I fully support public domain. But you can't just release all books for free without utterly decimating the industry.
And finally, I don't see a problem with treating ebooks like any other market. The price is what the market will bear. If Grisham has to learn to live with that reality, perhaps others do as well.
