[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Format C:

I buy the Hardcover, and then I download the ebook from the dark
Cost: HC full price.
Consequence: author and publisher get paid for one copy. I got two copies
The act is illegal in some jurisdiction, and unethical to most people.

Unethical to you, maybe, but certainly not to me. And probably not to most people if they have time to think about it without the influence of vested interests.

Ever notice how they tell you you're only buying a temporary, limited license to use the content, not the content itself? In those terms, you only HAVE one copy. You don't read two books at once. You have one "content unit" -- the words in that book -- displayed in several different forms.

Or, to put it in a simpler form, would you say your town library had a great selection of books when that they really had was ten thousand copies of "The Light in August"? That would be crazy. They have one book that could be read by 10,000 people at a time. If you have both a pbook and ebook of "The Light in August" you still have one book which, unless you do in fact behave unethically by giving away copies, can be read by one person at a time. One "content unit" which can be read by one person is pretty much the definition of what a single book is.

I buy the Hardcover used in mint condition from ebay, I scan & OCR myself the book.
Cost: HC half price, 5 hours of work.
Consequence: author and publisher are not paid. I got two copies.
The act is legal with few exceptions, and it is considered ethical almost by everyone.

First, in terms of the ebook, it's identical to the previous scenario. The ethics are not changed by who does the scanning. And you still only have one book.

Second, the author and publisher were paid. They were paid when the book was sold the first time around.

And yes, that is the only time they should be paid. If you bought a used bookshelf on eBay to put your new book on, would you think that the original manufacturer of the bookshelf should be paid, too?

I buy the HC used, and don't make a digital copy at all
Cost: HC half price
Consequence: author and publisher are not paid.
The act is legal and ethical everywhere.

Again, the author and publisher were already paid.

I sell the HC half price.
If I keep the digital copy, even if it's buried down somewhere in the middle of an heap of old CD-ROM that will be trashed in a couple of years, I'm doing bad.
If I don't keep that copy, nobody will trust me, and everybody thinks I'm keeping it.
Unethical in both cases, maybe illegal somewhere (I don't know...)

Specious argument. If digital content isn't available for use, it effectively doesn't exist. If your ebook is somewhere in that box of old CDs everyone has, and if it does turn up at some point you toss it out then, or just don't read it, there's no ethical problem.

I haven't got any digital copy at all. The only copy of that book I ever saw, is the Hardcover I bought for 5$ at a garage sell.
I read the book, and I sell it for 12$ on ebay.
Now, not only I read the book without any form of compensation for the author or the publisher. I'm even making money out of it.
And it's legal everywhere, and, I bet, it's ethically fair to almost everybody.

The author and the publisher got paid when the book was sold.

How about if you bought a bookshelf at a garage sale, then sold it on eBay? You used it without any compensation to the designer or the manufacturer! You made a profit from reselling that bookshelf! How could you live with yourself?

What is unethical is obtaining one content-unit and duplicating it into multiple separate (as in, possessed/used simultaneously by different people) content-units.

Someone a while back brought up the argument that reading an ebook you do not legitimately own (illegal download, etc.) is stealing because of sort of an opportunity cost of reading -- that is, you're only going to read X books in Y time, and if one of those is a book you didn't pay for, then you've robbed the company of a sale of a book you would have paid for if that one wasn't available. On that basis, not only buying a used book would be stealing, and reading a book in a library would be stealing, and borrowing a book from your brother would be stealing, but even re-reading a book you've already read would be stealing, because if you didn't re-read that book, you would have had to buy a new one. You're enjoying that book twice but only paying for it once! You don't expect to see a movie twice with the same ticket, right? So why should you expect to be able to read a book as many times as you want if you've only paid for it once? Re-reading is stealing! I expect to hear that from the publishers any time now.

The publishing industry, which is in financial trouble due to its own mismanagement (paying millions of dollars for books which never earn out their advances, for instance, and raising the price of children's books at several times the rate of inflation,) is slowly choking the goose that lays the golden egg.

Every year, fewer people read for pleasure. I've seen these statistics quoted so many times that I'm not sure if they're valid or not, but they're disturbingly in accord with my own anecdotal evidence. The market is slowly drying up. People are not reading.

The publishers' response? Raise prices. Restrict availability. Limit ebooks. In short ... discourage reading.

If they don't wake up and smell the coffee soon, they're going to find themselves without a market and wondering what happened. They will, no doubt, blame "piracy" or some other force outside their own walls, but they're doing it to themselves.

Another item of concern is the racks and racks of spinoff kitsch you see spawning around every popular juvenile series. Harry Potter stuff. Twilight stuff. You name it, there's stuff for it. Why is this a bad thing? Simple: You have a parent and child in a bookstore. You've gotten them through the doors. The child could beg that parent to buy him a book ... or a stuffed Snitch. Every dollar spent in a bookstore on licensed items is a dollar taken away from buying books. And reading, like smoking, is an addiction which is easiest to develop in the young. You'll find very few (if any) avid readers and book-buyers who were not avid readers as children. The more that child who is standing in front of the Twilight kitsch display reads when young, the more likely he or she is to become a lifetime book addict. Or, in short, a customer. The publishing industry (with a heavy emphasis on authors who are easily seduced by the "free money" of licensing fees) is cannibalizing their own future by persuading their customers to spend their bookstore budget on non-book items which do not encourage them to become long-term customers.

Stupid way to run an industry, IMO.

Short-term thinking at its worst.

They need to expand the market. To do that, they need to get people, especially young people, to read. To do that, especially in this day when public libraries are losing their funding and used book stores are dying out as their proprietors retire (do you know of a used book store run by someone under 50?), requires cheap, readily available reading matter. Which comes down to ebooks.

Instead, they decide to do things that maximize profits per unit, like only releasing Steven Saylor's new books in trade paperback (I had to order "The Triumph of Caesar" from the UK to get it as MM). Sure, the profit per book sold might be higher -- but they're selling fewer books, and those people who aren't buying the books that just doubled in price are doing something else with their money ... which probably isn't going to be buying any further books in that series, either. They're positioning their books as luxury goods -- it is often cheaper to buy a DVD of a movie, now, than the book it was made from -- and thereby losing customers instead of gaining them.

I can just imagine the phone call:

Agent: Great news, Mr. Author! With the publisher's new pricing structure, you'll get $1,000 in royalties for every book sold.

Author: Wow, that's wonderful, Mr. Agent. How many copies did we sell this year?

Agent: Well, um, one. To a guy who bought that $999 "I Am Rich" app for his iPhone.

Author: ...

They need to get more people reading, and keep more people reading, and to do that, they need to sell cheaper books. They need ebooks. And they need to worry a lot less about someone who wants an ebook version of their existing pbooks and a lot more about the massive number of people who don't buy books at all.