eBook Pirates

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by HarryT

In many cases, lowering prices will not significantly increase sales

For digital items, this has been proven false many times. It's that whole "marginal cost" thing again, digital items are where it really shines, because the supply is infinite, so the only thing affecting demand is the price.

The Steam sales on games have game authors reporting things like a 50% reduction in the end-user price results in 10 to 20 times as many sales as during the same time period when the game is not on sale. Since the game has already been written, that means that the author puts 5x as much money in their pocket as before.

Music is the same...at $0.99/track, Apple sold 2-3 times as much as when the track was priced at $1.29. That has to do with one of those weird things in human behavior...the price threshold.

As for ebooks, have you looked at the Amazon "best seller" lists lately? The top 100 is now dominated by sub-$5 books, and that is all because they sell far more than twice as many copies as the $10 ebooks. Again, part of that is because of the price thresholds that everyone sets in their own mind, but $5 is a big one for a lot of people.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by darryl

One was that most of the authors would get nothing anyway as likely very few of them would have repaid their advances, and most of these would probably never do so.

Of course, part of the reason they never get past their advances is the same reason that movies like Star Wars never "made a profit"...creative accounting.

[barryem]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

The whole "limited time" thing was for two reasons:

1. To promote authors to continue producing new works.
2. To allow the works to eventually become part of the shared knowledge of the country, available to all for free.

I think it's fairly obvious that the publishers of various media have used their lobbying power to hijack those principles. Now authors and eventually their children "own" the property they create. Personally I think that's silly. You can't own words or numbers.

The purpose of copyright, and there's much discussion about this in the writings of the founding fathers, was simply to give creators a head start at profiting from their creations. It was never to establish ownership.

Still, it is the law and it gets a lot of respect among law-abiding people, right or wrong. The fact is that most people pay for their books even if they know how to get them free.

===

When I was a teenager, around 1954 or 55, I began buying paperback books to read. Prior to that I'd just read my parents books. My typical cost was 10 cents for a new paperback. Some cost 15 cents and a really big one might cost 25 cents. If we adjust that for inflation, using Wolfram's inflation calculator, that new 15 cent paperback in 1955 should cost $1.38 today. I think we can all agree that it doesn't.

I'm a reasonably law abiding person. I don't speed much when I drive unless the other traffic makes me go faster to stay safe. I stop completely for stop signs. I pay for the books I read as long as I can find them for sale.

I think most people are about as honest as I am. And I think if publishers were as honest as most people are piracy would be a far smaller problem. It's really hard to feel good about paying my money into a system that's lobbying to change copyright further and further to their advantages, charging outrageous prices for books and then doing a sloppy job of editing and preparing them. I find far more mistakes now than I used to when I was younger.

I'll keep paying for my books because I'm not going to let people who do the things publishers do decide how I should conduct myself. But it rankles at times. And it's hard not to feel a lot of sympathy for those people who make books freely available on the internet. I'm not convinced they're doing something immoral. Illegal yes. Questionably moral, yes. But it's hard to say more than that.

Barry

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

For digital items, this has been proven false many times. It's that whole "marginal cost" thing again, digital items are where it really shines, because the supply is infinite, so the only thing affecting demand is the price.

As for ebooks, have you looked at the Amazon "best seller" lists lately? The top 100 is now dominated by sub-$5 books, and that is all because they sell far more than twice as many copies as the $10 ebooks. Again, part of that is because of the price thresholds that everyone sets in their own mind, but $5 is a big one for a lot of people.

As has been stated many times though, ebooks don't really follow other digital media. A lot of people only buy books when they are going to read them, $0.99 or $5.99 they are going to buy pretty much the same amount of books. Sure they may buy the $0.99 book instead of the $5.99 one but they aren't going to buy 6 of them.
A race to the bottom is never a race you want to win.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The overwhelming majority of the cost of an ebook is not its reproduction cost (which is as close to zero as makes no difference)

It's worth remembering that an ebook with ADE DRM has a minimum $0.22 reproduction cost, as that's the fee Adobe charge for use of their DRM.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

It's worth remembering that an ebook with ADE DRM has a minimum $0.22 reproduction cost, as that's the fee Adobe charge for use of their DRM.

Wait... I never realized that! So we actually pay for a DRM scheme that limits us in the use of the product?

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Wait... I never realized that! So we actually pay for a DRM scheme that limits us in the use of the product?

Of course, where do you think Adobe's businness is if it doesn't happen in that way?

[maddz]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Wait... I never realized that! So we actually pay for a DRM scheme that limits us in the use of the product?

Frankly I would prefer to pay the $0.22 to the author and not have DRM applied in the first place...

In fact, if there was a choice between a lower price for a version with DRM and a higher for one without, provided the price differential was not too much and the difference was paid to the author in addition to any royalties, then I would probably go for it.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by maddz

Frankly I would prefer to pay the $0.22 to the author and not have DRM applied in the first place...

In fact, if there was a choice between a lower price for a version with DRM and a higher for one without, provided the price differential was not too much and the difference was paid to the author in addition to any royalties, then I would probably go for it.

Same here...

[pwalker8]

Well, this all has gone in a very different direction than I expect when I posted the link. Interesting to be sure, but different.

One thing that I would point out is that different countries have very different traditions when it comes to copyright. The US tradition is very, very different than the English or European model which is different than other parts of the world, much of which has little tradition with regards to the idea of copyright, one of the reasons that what the West views as piracy is rampant in Asia and Africa.

The US did not implement the Berne Convention (sometimes known as the Victor Hugo Convention since he and his desire to prevent others from copying his works was the driving force behind it) until 1989. Pretty much the biggest reason that the US signed it was to protect the movie and music (remember the Sonny Bono Act?) industry. Prior to 1976, when it was greatly expanded, US copyright law was fairly static. Initially, it was 14 years, plus 14 year if the author was still alive and request the extension. In addition, copyright only applied to books that were formally registered and the vast majority of books from the time period were never registered. The requirement for registration was removed in 1831 and that was the last major change to copyright prior to 1976. So for most of US history, copyright was very much a limited concept that was balanced with the public good. When I was in college, teachers still had the right to make copies of articles for class use under the fair use doctrine.

The US view of copyright was heavily influenced by Ben Franklin and the various other founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson who were prolific writers and inventors. It should also be noted that Ben Franklin was the driving force behind the first public libraries in the US as well as a well known writer and publisher, so he was very much aware of the competing interests with regards to authors making money and making books widely available to the public. One can get an idea of how copyright and patents were viewed when the Constitution was written by reading Thomas Jefferson's famous letter to Isaac McPherson giving his views on what we now call intellectual property.

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/found...a1_8_8s12.html

This has greatly influenced the legal views of copyright in the US, even today. There is a tremendous pressure to move to a more European model since many business models are now built on the concept of intellectual property, which is why current copyright and patent law in the US is a bit of a mess and somewhat contradictory at times.

The European view of copyright started out more as a combination of Royal grants of privilege as well as attempt to control the flow of ideas than it did with the idea of a work being the property of it's author. As such, it doesn't really have the same tradition of balancing privilege with responsibility. Europe doesn't really have the concept of fair use like the US does.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

It's worth remembering that an ebook with ADE DRM has a minimum $0.22 reproduction cost, as that's the fee Adobe charge for use of their DRM.

I've seen rumors that the fee may have increased somewhat (the $0.22 number is from around 2009 when Adobe was more transparent about it), but haven't been able to find much concrete data on it. Not sure if the fee for expiring books (library books) is still $0.08 or not either.

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Wait... I never realized that! So we actually pay for a DRM scheme that limits us in the use of the product?

There are the per book fees, plus the fees to licence the Content Server ($6,500+), yearly "maintenance fees" ($1,500+), and the fees to license RMSDK for the actual reading apps and devices. A lot of support calls to stores and libraries are DRM related too. DRM may be snake oil, but it's expensive snake oil.

[ekbell]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

As has been stated many times though, ebooks don't really follow other digital media. A lot of people only buy books when they are going to read them, $0.99 or $5.99 they are going to buy pretty much the same amount of books. Sure they may buy the $0.99 book instead of the $5.99 one but they aren't going to buy 6 of them.
A race to the bottom is never a race you want to win.

Depends on the buyer, many people either have a tendency to give up on books partway through (and may well reason that cheaper books will give them more to sample and a increased chance of liking one) or have a limited book/entertainment budget (in which case they may well be happy to buy six books for the price of one). I, myself, have a weakness for limited-time sales even if it leads to stockpiling.

Personally when a particular book is more then I'm willing to pay, I check my library and if it's not there I'll find another book. This is has been true even if it's a book I particularly want to read and the waiting time is long (I've waited months for a particularly popular book).

However, if it's what I deem to be a fair price then the desirability of owning a new book (or at least as close as I can get) will trump a free read.

I agree that it is possible to charge too little as well as too much and my experience as a buyer indicates that the sweet point will differ for different types of books.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

I've seen rumors that the fee may have increased somewhat (the $0.22 number is from around 2009 when Adobe was more transparent about it), but haven't been able to find much concrete data on it. Not sure if the fee for expiring books (library books) is still $0.08 or not either.

It's certainly around that amount. But it does seem that Adobe no longer make that info readily available.

I did find a company that provides DRM to small ebook sellers using Adobe Content Server. Their 'enterprise' level service costs $300/month plus $0.30 per download.

This fee to Adobe is why it's worth it to Amazon to maintain their own DRM, even apart from the tie-in factors.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by ekbell

Depends on the buyer, many people either have a tendency to give up on books partway through (and may well reason that cheaper books will give them more to sample and a increased chance of liking one) or have a limited book/entertainment budget (in which case they may well be happy to buy six books for the price of one). I, myself, have a weakness for limited-time sales even if it leads to stockpiling.

Personally when a particular book is more then I'm willing to pay, I check my library and if it's not there I'll find another book. This is has been true even if it's a book I particularly want to read and the waiting time is long (I've waited months for a particularly popular book).

However, if it's what I deem to be a fair price then the desirability of owning a new book (or at least as close as I can get) will trump a free read.

I agree that it is possible to charge too little as well as too much and my experience as a buyer indicates that the sweet point will differ for different types of books.

From an economic point of view, one looks at the elasticity of the price curve to maximize profit. So from a seller's point of view, they may make more money selling X at $10 than Y at $1 if Y is not more than 10 times X. If you can sell 5000 copies at $10, then you get $50,000. If you sell 25,000 copies at $1, then you still only get half as much ($25,000) even though you sold 5 times as many copies. The wild card here is discoverablity, i.e. what is the likelihood that someone is actually going to buy at copy at any price above 0. To a certain extent, this is what co-pays in health care is all about.

[Ksquared]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

And Harlan Ellison was still peeved about it!

Harlan is always peeved about something! (But I do like his writing...)