Quote:
Originally Posted by K-Thom
Simply: Friends don't let friends buy eBooks above 9.99. It's us - them customers - who decide which price is acceptable and accepted. Not the publishers.
Silly them.
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Although I rarely buy an ebook that costs more than a few dollars, I have no objection to paying more than $9.99 for a well-formatted nonfiction book. And before you jump on my opening phrase, let me say that the reason why I rarely pay more than a few dollars is because I buy in ebook form novels from unknown authors. All novels that I buy written by authors I like, such as David Weber and Robin Hobb, and all nonfiction books I buy (primarily history, science, biography -- not politics or self-help), I buy in hardcover.
I consider ebooks to be throwaway books, not keepers, whereas I consider hardcover books worthy of keeping in a "permanent" collection. I never buy books like Dan Brown's or Stephen King's; I'm not into the "bestseller" list novels.
When publishers start producing nonfiction books with proper quality and a DRM scheme that is device agnostic and guaranteed to keep the ebook available until the copyright expires and the book falls into the public domain, then I'll start buying nonfiction ebooks as well. My view is that if I'm willing to pay $25 for the hardback, I'm willing to pay $15 or so for the ebook if it meets the foregoing criteria. I do not consider $9.99 as an unbreachable divide between buy/not buy; some books are worth more and some less.
What I'm saying is that just as different hardcover books have different values to me (e.g., I paid $100 for Michael Burlingame's
Abraham Lincoln: A Life), so do ebooks and an artificial border makes no sense to me. Either a particular book has value or it doesn't.