[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Amadeus

That is exactly my point. If I were a Sony shareholder, I'd be wondering about the effectiveness of their policy. You gain more revenue by having hordes of happy customers making repeat purchases than you do by driving them away with high prices and restrictive controls on the product. The knock-on effect is that if you have customers bad-mouthing you and accusing you of being greedy, it doesn't help your other product areas either.

Sorry - I really don't agree with you that prices are high. The typical price of a book in the Connect store is something like half, or even less, what it would cost me to buy that same paper book here in the UK.

Then there is the issue of motivation to crack the copyright protection - all it takes is a few p*ssed-off tech-savvy users with enough resources and you end up like Microsoft have with the breaking of their protected .LIT format. Once all your released catalogue gets pushed out illegally into the public domain you start to lose a lot of potential sales, so better try to avoid that problem by a more enlightened approach.

I must respectfully disagree with you again. I think you're doing most users an injustice by saying that they will obtain illegal copies of copyrighted material rather than buy it. I still buy music CDs even though I could trivially download the same music from the Internet "free". Why? Because I'm honest, and I believe that most other users are honest too. BTW, one minor point - releasing illegal copies of copyrighted material onto the Internet certainly does not place it into the "public domain". That is a phrase which has a specific legal meaning, and illegally copied material certainly isn't included in it.

I'm advocating the kind of model that offers excellent value, wide range, good quality and flexibility - like the extremely successful "Gourmet Chinese Buffet" concept, rather than trying to sell "The Ivy" to people who can't afford to eat lunch there every day.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with your examples, but personally I feel that the Connect Store does sell books at reasonable prices. Remember, most of the cost of publishing is not the process of printing the book - it's the work done by the publisher in advance of publication, the cost of which has to be re-couped in the price of the book. I say that as an author. There is a myth that eBooks should somehow be a lot cheaper than printed books. That's simply not true - all the costs other than the relatively minor costs of printing are still there.