[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Part of the problem, and part of the scare tactics, is how the industry figures its "losses". Just like the BSA assumes that every warez d00d who has a cracked copy of Photoshop CS4 would have bought it at full retail price otherwise (because every teenager has $700 to spend on software to put lame captions on his Facebook pictures), the publishers assume, or claim to assume, that everyone who downloads a 3,000-book torrent would have bought every single book in it at list. That's a $36,000 loss! Except, of course, that I don't think any of us know anyone who spends $36,000 a year, or probably even a decade, on books.

The "war on drugs" uses similar tactics.
They calculate the street value of the smallest known amount of a drug, weigh the amount they sieze, and declare how many millions they've taken off the street.

So--if marijuana sells for $25/gram, and they sieze a warehouse with 200 plants, they put those plants on a scale (stems, roots, leaves & all), note that they've got a ton or so of plant material, and declare that they shut down a dealer with $14million in contraband. Riiiight. (No idea what marijuana plants weigh, and my concept of street value is based on extrapolation from 20-year-old conversations.)

Speaking of the cost of producing an ebook, it costs a hell of a lot more to produce a movie -- yet compare the prices of the end product. Even direct-to-video movies, with no theater revenue to help offset the production costs, still seem to turn a profit for their producers at those prices. Customers do notice this, and they consequently start feeling gouged when a book is selling for more than a movie.

Movies, even direct-to-vid movies, get a lot more viewers than books get readers. (A movie is a 2-hour time investment towards entertainment; a book is longer than that for everyone except bibliphile speed-readers.) And I think that's an area where production cost of the individual units *does* matter. For all the hype about books only costing a couple of dollars to print (and distribute and store, which is a lot of where I question the claims), discs cost *pennies* to produce. Even good-quality DVDs, bought by the case (truckload) are very cheap, and so are the packing materials. The color picture on the outside of the box is probably the most expensive part of a DVD.

Movie sales are measured in the millions. Book sales are measured in the thousands. DVDs take less storage space and less display space to advertise.

That said, YES... people will consider, should I buy this book, or a movie instead? And the book needs to have something compelling going for it; mainstream ebooks at the price of a DVD, with DRM, are a hard sell against all the other forms of entertainment available.

We're the real mass market when it comes to ebooks.

Indeed, and the mainstream publishers are seriously missing something here. We're the ones who *will* switch our purchases from $4 used paperbacks to $6 new ebooks... where they exist. But we won't switch from $4 used paperbacks to $17.99 new ebooks that require code-stripping before we can read them in our choice of venue. I could be convinced to buy 2 shiny ebooks instead of 3 beat-up paperbacks; I'll make up the reading gap on the blogs and fanfic archives. (I *will* be reading that ~80,000 words worth of content *somewhere*.) I'm not going to be convinced to buy 1 shiny ebook instead of 4 1/2 paperbacks.

But the big publishers don't know I exist, because I never bought hardbacks* and rarely bought new paperbacks. So none of their marketing attempts are aimed at me, and I continue to buy used paperbacks (and chop the bindings off, and scan them, and OCR them & correct them and throw them into my ebook reader 'cos I can't stand to read paper anymore) and low-price ebooks and make up the reading gap on fanfic archives.


*Slight hyperbole. I've bought, oh, four or five new hardbacks I can think of, in my life. I think that's close enough to "never" for publishers' purposes.