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Originally Posted by ricdiogo
Yes, that's what I believe.
It's not that everyone is going to share the file. You only need, one person to do it.
Even if a lot of people do actually pay for the book but we assume that some others (even if a minority) doesn't (and this is what already happens today), the copyright model is something different, because you don't have a 1-payment-per-book model as you used to. Even if this model can still support writers it'll be unstable and I believe that if authors want to be fully payed, they have to think of something else.
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Current estimates are that on average, a book is read by four different readers during its physical life. I very much doubt that the ratio of paid-for books to unpaid for books will change that much with ebooks, if sites like Baen offer an easy to use way to find and buy ebooks legally. It's a pain to find and download books from the darknet, and the quality is pretty inconsistent. I think Apple has pretty thoroughly shown that a usable interface and moderate prices can provide plenty of revenue to divide among e-tailers, publishers, and creators, even with filesharing still going on.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ricdiogo
If you live in the US and you buy from an American e-publisher you can easily judge the price in terms of "fair or not faire". But 1 USD has a completely different value in Washington or in Beijing. When you sell in the Internet you sell to the entire world. Are you sure someone from New Delhi will think of 1USD as a fair price for an ebook?
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People in Beijing and New Delhi aren't buying books from US publishers as it is, so what's the difference? If someone really wanted to, they could create a legal ebook purchase and download site that would vary prices based on location as determined from IP address. Sure, some people would spoof the IP address to get a cheaper price. Most people won't care enough to bother. And if the publisher feels they can't sell the book profitably (for publisher, author, and ebookstore) at a low enough price for the New Delhi market, they aren't going to be able to sell a p-book to that market, either. Ebook production prices are definitely lower than p-book production prices, no matter how you slice it.
Besides which, in another 20 years I'm not sure the dollar will have that much different value in the US, Beijing, and New Delhi. Globalization is having a lot of side effects, and one of them is increased buying power in places that are on the receiving end of the outsourced jobs from the developed countries. (Another is weakened buying power in those same developed countries -- if this goes on, authors may not get paid as much, but their local economies may look more like Beijing and New Delhi anyway.)