Quote:
Originally Posted by Marcy
The original poster clearly said he was willing to pay the same price the hardback was being currently offered at. The publishers should be totally happy with that -- they make the same amount of money and don't have any productions costs except those they've already paid, i.e. it costs them nothing *extra* to make the ebook.
I'm totally fine with ebooks being the same price as the hardcover for the first 6 months or even a year. But denying availability is silly. By matching the current lowest pricing, i.e. initially the hardcover price and then the paperback price when it comes out, the publishers can only increase sales. People who are willing to pay hardcover prices can buy the ebook right away. Others who always waited for the paperback, can wait for the ebook price to drop. Seems like win-win to me.
-Marcy
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Only happy? I'd say those publishers should be ecstatic! And they don't make the same amount of money, they make much, much more - no material, production, warehouse, shipping, or return costs. Margins are through the roof!
Denying availability, while silly, is all about creating artificial scarcity.
Consider a book as just a container for an author's work be it words, ideas, and maybe illustrations. Most of the time that container has been made of paper, glue, and ink. These containers have hard covers, soft covers, and sometimes leather covers.
You might also consider other creative fields whose containers have consisted of wax cylinders, vinyl discs, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, CDs, VHS, laser disc, and DVDs.
My experience has been that most of the time, the value placed on a work has been determined by the type of container and sometimes the market type/size.
Now consider that a time has come where a revolutionary technology has been developed that has the same capacity for holding words (both written and spoken), ideas, illustrations, and moving pictures. This new type of container requires virtually no resources to create as many duplicate containers as are desired. Since abundance exists, artificial scarcity must be created in order to give monetary value to otherwise free containers/copies.
Denying availability and DRM are essential aspects to creating artificial scarcity. Their sole purpose is to arbitrarily preserve value in the face of abundance.