EU vice-president: Copyright legislation is “pushing people to steal”

[ApK]

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

I don't buy that. Paperbooks provided more features like portability, weight, reproducibility, accessibility compared to stone tablets and yet were not priced higher

Was that serious? Cuz between stone tablets and paperbacks there were..oh...some slight economic and social changes in the world which just might have had some impact on the matter greater than how many stone tablet novels Moses could have carried on vacation. You think?

[howyoudoin]

Originally Posted by ApK

Was that serious? Cuz between stone tablets and paperbacks there were..oh...some slight economic and social changes in the world which just might have had some impact on the matter greater than how many stone tablet novels Moses could have carried on vacation. You think?

Expound.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

Expound.

Really? Ok. How about there was no mass market of wage-earning literate consumers looking to spend disposable income on entertainment on stone tablets, nor a stone tablet publishing industry looking to find a pricing model to capture and sustain itself on that market.

It was a bad comparison.
There are certainly various examples of more or less cost saving being passed on to consumers that would be more meaningful.

Am I missing something? Can you cite some stone tablet retail prices and sales statistics that we can compare to the paperback version?

[howyoudoin]

Originally Posted by ApK

Really? Ok. How about there was no mass market of wage-earning literate consumers looking to spend disposable income on entertainment on stone tablets, nor a stone tablet publishing industry looking to find a pricing model to capture and sustain itself on that market.

It was a bad comparison.
There are certainly various examples of more or less cost saving being passed on to consumers that would be more meaningful.

Am I missing something? Can you cite some stone tablet retail prices and sales statistics that we can compare to the paperback version?

Are you suggesting that there isn't a significant cost difference between publishing and transporting and storing stone tablets vs paperback books? What are the possible means of mass producing stone tablets that are cheaper than mass producing paperbooks? What are these cheaper means of transporting stone tablets? What are these cheaper means of storing stone tablets?

[ApK]

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

Are you suggesting that there isn't a significant cost difference between publishing and transporting and storing stone tablets vs paperback books? What are the possible means of mass producing stone tablets that are cheaper than mass producing paperbooks? What are these cheaper means of transporting stone tablets? What are these cheaper means of storing stone tablets?

I'm just saying it's irrelevant.

[SteveEisenberg]

Long ago, I was behind the scenes in one of the world's larger libraries of ancient stone tablets. Lots of the tablets were receipts for financial transactions. But I don't think a single one of them showed the price of a stone narrative fiction book. So I won't speculate there.

There's no law against a company pricing based on costs of inputs, and a few probably do. But I'm pretty sure the vast majority of them, publishers and otherwise, price not on cost, but on what the market will bear.

An iPad has lower cost of materials than a desktop PC. Apple charges not based on those costs, but on what the market will bear. That market-will-bear price is higher than I would pay. But, lucky for Apple, many tens of millions of people feel otherwise, and can afford to act on their feelings. So Apple prices accordingly. And then they plow a lot of the profits back into the hands of stockholders:

Apple spent $56 billion on buybacks in 2014

Publishers don't live in that high-profit world. They have good years and bad years, depending on whether there's a mega-bestseller that year. But, on average, they don't earn extraordinary profits, and lack the ability to pour billions back to the stockholders. But it's true, that, just like Apple, the big five price based on what consumers will pay rather than on their costs. Horrors

[darryl]

@Steve. Thanks for your post. I will accept "what the market will bear" for the purposes of this discussion. And say that this is the main reason why we like to see competion in an industry, and for the existence of a substantial body of law including anti-trust law. What the market will bear does not work very well when we have a monopoly, or in this case an oligopoly. All but one of the major players colluded with Apple in an unlawful conspiracy to eliminate competition at the retail level. Despite the result in Court, they did in fact succeed. We currently have no competion at the retail level, at least so far as books from the large traditional publishers are concerned.

[howyoudoin]

Apple makes their money off hardware. Piracy of hardware is a physical impossibility as of now. If one can't bear the cost of an iPhone, then tough luck. He either sucks it up and pays the asked price or looks elsewhere for a different product.

Publishers who sell ebooks sell a product that sees a reaction in the form of piracy that is to some degree dependant on pricing. Publishers do have a right to run the numbers and price ebooks the same as physical books. But then it seems awfully puerile of them to then complain about piracy by pretending that it isn't to some degree related to their pricing policy (yes, I am aware that not all pirates are potential purchasers). The having of the cake and the eating of it do not go hand in hand as they seem to think. The comparison with a (mainly) hardware vendor like Apple is not appropriate.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

Apple makes their money off hardware. Piracy of hardware is a physical impossibility as of now.

I guess. But doesn't patent infringement come close?

Also:

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/where-s...art-phones-go/

According to Consumer Reports, 3.1 million Americans were the victims of smartphone theft in 2013, up from 1.6 million in 2012. The mobile security firm Lookout believes that one in 10 smartphone users in the US have had their phones stolen; 68 percent of those victims never saw their device again.

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

Publishers do have a right to run the numbers and price ebooks the same as physical books. But then it seems awfully puerile of them to then complain about piracy by pretending that it isn't to some degree related to their pricing policy (yes, I am aware that not all pirates are potential purchasers).

All else equal, if the price is higher, there will be more shrinkage. By how much, it is easy to say in the case of well-tracked physical goods like automobiles.* In the case of eBooks, there's no way to know the relationship between price and piracy. I doubt the relationship amounts to much for reasons I've suggested on other threads**. But, yes, basic economic incentives tell me there is a relationship between price and piracy. I'm sure the same is true of paper book shoplifting. So what? Are we going to start blaming shoplifting at neighborhood bookstores on lack of discounting?

_____________________
* It is true that luxury cars aren't, as a class, in recent years, the most often stolen. This is because effective anti-theft measures are built into luxury cars years before they appear in mainstream models. But, as my link shows, more expensive luxury cars are more likely to be stolen.

** The reward to risk ratio is similarly close to infinite for downloading an eBook without paying, regardless of pricing, due to the rarity of criminal or civil sanctions.

[howyoudoin]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

I guess. But doesn't patent infringement come close?

Also:

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/where-s...art-phones-go/




All else equal, if the price is higher, there will be more shrinkage. By how much, it is easy to say in the case of well-tracked physical goods like automobiles.* In the case of eBooks, there's no way to know the relationship between price and piracy. I doubt the relationship amounts to much for reasons I've suggested on other threads**. But, yes, basic economic incentives tell me there is a relationship between price and piracy. I'm sure the same is true of paper book shoplifting. So what? Are we going to start blaming shoplifting at neighborhood bookstores on lack of discounting?

_____________________
* It is true that luxury cars aren't, as a class, in recent years, the most often stolen. This is because effective anti-theft measures are built into luxury cars years before they appear in mainstream models. But, as my link shows, more expensive luxury cars are more likely to be stolen.

** The reward to risk ratio is similarly close to infinite for downloading an eBook without paying, regardless of pricing, due to the rarity of criminal or civil sanctions.

Patent infringement and shoplifting are easier to control because those are tougher crimes to execute and easier to detect and prosecute than Ebook piracy, aren't they?