What is with these Publishers?

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by kjk

Saying a book should cost x or y because this is what paper costs is just as deceptive as saying this is what digital storage/file transfer costs, so that's how we should set book prices. Isn't the market supposed to set prices?

I concur. There is also a tremendous misperception that a) what costs so much is the physical object, and b) there is, or ought to be, a direct link between what the object costs to make, and its resulting price.

This is one reason why the electronics "tear-downs" are rather pointless. An ebook reader might cost $100 to manufacture, but the purchase price may have to cover some or all of 3 years of free cellular wireless, warranties, plus the usual suspects (taxes, customer service, etc etc)....

Of course, it would be great if I could buy any book for $5. But if I want the people who actually produced and delivered the book to be compensated, then I guess I have to suck it up and pay a little extra.

[DawnFalcon]

HansTWN - Of course the product is available. For free, come to it.


Kali Yuga - Oh look, $6 Baen ebooks. Of course, they've also embraced webscriptions and eARC's as additional revenue schemes, and they're not deliberately devaluing their products with DRM or trying to stop you buying their books with regional restrictions.

Heck, they're not even taking exclusive ebook rights.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

I concur. There is also a tremendous misperception that a) what costs so much is the physical object, and b) there is, or ought to be, a direct link between what the object costs to make, and its resulting price.

This is one reason why the electronics "tear-downs" are rather pointless. An ebook reader might cost $100 to manufacture, but the purchase price may have to cover some or all of 3 years of free cellular wireless, warranties, plus the usual suspects (taxes, customer service, etc etc)....

Of course, it would be great if I could buy any book for $5. But if I want the people who actually produced and delivered the book to be compensated, then I guess I have to suck it up and pay a little extra.

Exactemundo, what does it cost to produce an iphone? 120 or so, I think. And the real selling price, unsubsidized, unlocked? Around 800. So? Is Apple selling it for 140 now that we know the production cost? Is anyone calling Apple the greediest company on the face of the planet for those margins?

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

HansTWN - Of course the product is available. For free, come to it.

Thanks for the offer, but I will rather stay clean Yes, we wish they all were like Baen, unfortunately SciFi is not exactly what I am looking for.

[Dark123]

Originally Posted by NightGeometry

Was it on here that I read someone talking about Amazon being a cloud computing company, the book store is 'just' a reference / proof of concept implementation. (That's obviously not currently true, but it actually may be at some point).

Anyway - just because Amazon have those things, doesn't mean it doesn't cost anything. If ebooks start to sell for $2, then pbook sales go down, then Amazon's costs need to come completely out of ebooks, and the price rockets.

Personally I understand that a books cost is not just the unit cost, and that that is a potential small part of cost. However, surely the balance is sell 10 copies @ £20 or 1000 @ £1. The latter is obviously the better value proposition for ebooks, but likely not for pbooks. Then again someone was quoted recently pointing out that most readers have a shortage of time over money. If the price of books were 1/10 what they are now, I wouldn't suddenly read 10 as many books. I suspect a lot of people here are also in that position, we are by our nature voracious readers. However if the average person only reads a few books a year (just the years best sellers), then they are unlikely to read more without some prompting, and they seem extremely unlikely to buy an ereader given that value proposition.

I'd guess the push for news papers and magazines on devices is one way of prompting people to buy more books. Get people to read their paper on an ereader, and suddenly they could also use the same device for books...

(I go off topic so often, I don't even remember what the original discussion was about.)

That is a bad comparison. I said new release £10 and the eBook should be £5. Like I said before Amazon has everything in place they could do this so easily. I haven't checked a lot but new releases eBook prices on Amazon are a bit cheaper than hardcover ones.
The current eBook Readers are people who bought a device that can do nothing else but store and display eBooks. These are the people they shouldn't be trying to screw over, yet they are and I will not be one.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Thanks for the offer, but I will rather stay clean Yes, we wish they all were like Baen, unfortunately SciFi is not exactly what I am looking for.

I wasn't "offering" anything.

I was pointing out the flaw in your argument.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

I wasn't "offering" anything.

I was pointing out the flaw in your argument.

Of course, you were not "offering" anything. You were just pointing out the usual "options". Which, for reasons discussed before at length, I prefer not to take advantage of.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Of course, you were not "offering" anything. You were just pointing out the usual "options". Which, for reasons discussed before at length, I prefer not to take advantage of.

Advantage? Your argument is simply incorrect, because of the darknets.
You are of course now of course trying to handwave this away.
There is no "go without" box, and hasn't been for nearly a decade.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Advantage? Your argument is simply incorrect, because of the darknets.
You are of course now of course trying to handwave this away.
There is no "go without" box, and hasn't been for nearly a decade.

Illegal options are always available, no matter what you do, not just for digital downloads. But most of us would never consider using them, so we can ignore breaking the law for the purposes of our discussions. That would be like saying: "of course you can have that Ferrari, just take it!". Even though you cannot believe it, a lot of us don't want to do such things and prefer to stay clean and do what we think is right and in the end, best for all us.

[DawnFalcon]

Mm hum.

It doesn't matter in the slightest if you won't use them as a matter of personal reality. Realistically, you could. And that's all that matters - a massive chunk of the market will, to one degree or another, use the darknets.

Don't confuse personal morality with economic realities.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Mm hum.

It doesn't matter in the slightest if you won't use them as a matter of personal reality. Realistically, you could. And that's all that matters - a massive chunk of the market will, to one degree or another, use the darknets.

Don't confuse personal morality with economic realities.

I never did confuse the two. I even admitted that these "options" exist. And, honestly speaking, I don't consider "I refuse to take what doesn't belong to me" a matter of "personal morality". But, now, we do not want to start another thread on this matter, do we?

[rogue_ronin]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Illegal options are always available, no matter what you do, not just for digital downloads. But most of us would never consider using them, so we can ignore breaking the law for the purposes of our discussions. That would be like saying: "of course you can have that Ferrari, just take it!". Even though you cannot believe it, a lot of us don't want to do such things and prefer to stay clean and do what we think is right and in the end, best for all us.

'Course, if you could get into a Ferrari and drive away -- yet leave an exact duplicate behind, there wouldn't really be a crime, now would there?

A Ferrari would have no value at all.

m a r

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by rogue_ronin

'Course, if you could get into a Ferrari and drive away -- yet leave an exact duplicate behind, there wouldn't really be a crime, now would there?

A Ferrari would have no value at all.

m a r

Lol, if that would have been possible than they would never even have bothered to create that first Ferrari. Copying hurts the creators and takes away the incentive to create. And sure, it would be a crime if you left behind a perfect replica that you had created. Because it wasn't made by Ferrari, by law it still wouldn't be a Ferrari. Just as the copies not made by the copyright holders of ebooks or music are not legal copies (with some fair use exceptions).

And by your logic, if I take your car without your permission, drive it around, put enough gas in it after I return it -- that would be ok? After all, I have returned it to you in the exact same condition.

Anyway, this has been discussed ad nauseam many times in other threads. I can't stop you, maybe the law will, sooner or later.

[rogue_ronin]

If the law is good enough for you, well then!, we'll all just be quiet. No one has ever used the law to do wrong, so it'll be fine.

It's good that you know what's best for all of us and are acting in our best interests by supporting powerful corporations. They're the victims here, after all.

Describing us as thieves is also an excellent, exemplary act that should shame us into behaving like proper consumers. The rest of us aren't able to distinguish right from wrong, nor can we possibly develop an ethical understanding of things greater than the profit motive; we're just doing bad, bad things 'cuz we're bad, bad people.

m a r

ps: The logical flaws in your argument are too massive to go into. Really. It's not a Ferrari if it's not made by Ferrari? Then any copy of an eBook is not the eBook that people are claiming copyright on, because it wasn't made by the author! So where's the crime? I could go on, but it's really not worth it.

[dsvick]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

... Oh look, $6 Baen ebooks. Of course, they've also embraced webscriptions and eARC's as additional revenue schemes, and they're not deliberately devaluing their products with DRM or trying to stop you buying their books with regional restrictions.

Heck, they're not even taking exclusive ebook rights.

Double heck, they are even giving away a lot of their books for free. There is the free library of course, but also, in the last hardcover book I got from the library, there was a CD in the back, which, much to my delighted surprise had almost every work written to date by the author (David Weber). I was amazed, I already have almost all of them in pBooks, but now an e version - for free!! Most of these books I'm sure are well beyond their prime sales dates so giving them away is not costing Baen too much in lost sales, in fact I'd bet that they come out way ahead when you factor in good will and publicity - I know they keep getting favorably mentioned here!