Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
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. 
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.
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.
That's nice, but it doesn't make the fundamental costs of producing and selling books go away.
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.
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.  |
I'm amazed at how expertly you failed to properly comprehend most of what I said, and then proceeded to completely extricate it from context when making your uninformed responses.
Hopefully others who are better at reading were wise enough to refer to the original post which was not colored by your mistakes. However, since that may be too assumptive, I'll clarify a couple of your errors here.
The major points are...
- You seemed to completely misunderstand that I was talking about public perception, not actual costs. If you knew anything about markets you would know that it matters little what things actually cost to produce when setting prices, but, it matters greatly what people are willing to pay. If you intend to change price structures, you have to convince the market that the change is worthy, particularly if prices are going up, which they need to in the case of eBooks. The public perception of paying for a copy needs to be replaced by the perception of paying for the service that was provided from author to distribute for the production of that IP.
- Subscription access is just one of many models that should or could be employed. Not to mention I made it quite clear that it was my own preference.
- I feel my statement about artificial supply constraints is important enough to correct your reading comprehension error there. The presentation of sales of electronic media, especially books, is one of individual item purchases. "Buy." And since it is made in an analogous manner to physical sales, it promotes the public perception that they are paying for copies, not license to access. They are then led to believe it should be FAR CHEAPER THAN PAPER because it's just so cheap and easy to make an electronic copy. Obviously this is a misperception and was a major aspect of my entire point that you missed. But it's a perception that exists and needs to be changed and that's a primary challenge for this industry now. It's evident in the response of retailers to lower their book prices to compete with amazon's kindle prices.
I'm fairly certain if you tried reading again with a little more thought you'd see that your contradictions are misplaced.