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IMHO:
From my perspective, I can't quite understand why the same discounts available at a grocery store (10-25% off the cover price) can't be applied to an ebook.
I've grown past the idea that $15 is too much for an ebook of a new novel, and I've noticed that ebook prices of new hardcovers are generally slightly cheaper than the physical version even after the hardcopy is discounted (the e-copy is somewhat-to-substantially more discounted). I've embraced the Apple concept that you should be willing to pay for content and that content is as valuable as something-to-hold.
What I can't get past are full-price e-version paperbacks. Amazon offers virtually every physical paperback in their 4-for-3 program (pay for three books, get the fourth one free), but very few ebooks of paperbacks are discounted at all, and many are actually more expensive than the physical book at full retail. $9.99 is an irrational ebook pricing model when the physical-copy full retail price is $7.99. The vast majority (I think) will simply not buy the book when it's that much more expensive.
As to greed, I've got no problem with it when exercised rationally. For example, the market will bear a mass market popular paperback at $7.99. The actual cost (I'm making this up) to produce the e-version is .99 cents. Hell, yes! the publisher should market the ebook for as much as $7.99 (though $4 to $6 might ensure more sales and greater long-term profit), and as a shareholder, my company should be doing nothing less than maximizing profit.
To me, it's not just the "perception issue" on physical vs. virtual, though I will agree, I do see a virtual version as less valuable than a physical version.
Further, book pricing has been discussed here and a number of other places - essentially, at each stage of distribution, there's a 100% markup:
A $50 cover book cost the seller $25, which cost his distributor $12.50, which cost the publisher $6.25 which cost the printer $3.13, etc. (and yeah, I'm possibly missing a stage, percentages may be off at certain stages, but you get the gist).
You take distribution out, that means more money for the publisher/creator, which is great - but, for me, that doesn't mean "now the publisher/creator gets the full print cover price for an e-version."
Additionally, many/most content publishers have been quite clear about their belief that right-of-first-sale not extending to virtual versions of the work.
I don't think an e-book should cost nothing compared to a paper-book, but I'm not really enamored of the concept that I should pay the same price, or close to the same price for something that is intangible and I have less rights to use it than I do with the "real" version.
What is an appropriate price? I dunno - it's incredibly fluid for me, but it's definitely less than 75% of retail print pricing (to start).
Publishers have a massive problem with perception of value. When you can't hold it in your hands and easily pass it along to a friend, $10-plus just feels too expensive to many people.
It's not really a "problem". Perception of value is value, pretty much by definition. (If businesses can't/won't provide value to customers, then THEY'RE DOING IT WRONG.)
If it "feels" too expensive to many people, then it is too expensive. As Brian E. Harris says above, it is unlikely people will "pay the same price, or close to the same price for something that is intangible and (one has) less rights to use it than (they) do with the "real" version."
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If it "feels" too expensive to many people, then it is too expensive. As Brian E. Harris says above, it is unlikely people will "pay the same price, or close to the same price for something that is intangible and (one has) less rights to use it than (they) do with the "real" version."
Particularly since (as you allude to) the current model for e-books is software instead of paper books--you buy a (revocable) license to read an e-book, not a copy of the e-book itself.
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My personal opinion on ebook prices are $10 for books that are in hardcover, and 20% off the cover or $10 for paperbacks (which ever is cheaper).
That is at least my opinions for most works of fiction. Paizo sells the ePub of their novels for $6.99, which is actually 30% off the price of the paperback.
Yeah, $6.99 is still too much for me. I'll pay the $9.99 that I'm paying (minus any discounts) for subscribing, which nets me the ePub as well, and that's worth it.
But $6.99 for an intangible when the print is $3 more? Eh, it meets my "less than 75% of retail print pricing" noted above, but still seems too much.
Honestly, even if it was $2.50, I'd rather pay $10 for the print.
I don't see a value in ePub (or other electronic versions of books). I obviously see a value in print.
Edited to add: Point of clarification: I don't see the value of the ePub as a standalone entity, separate from the print. I definitely see a value as an ancillary product, and see a value of the product itself, just that I don't know that I'd buy the ePub if there wasn't a print version to go along with it.
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Yeah, $6.99 is still too much for me. I'll pay the $9.99 that I'm paying (minus any discounts) for subscribing, which nets me the ePub as well, and that's worth it.
But $6.99 for an intangible when the print is $3 more? Eh, it meets my "less than 75% of retail print pricing" noted above, but still seems too much.
Honestly, even if it was $2.50, I'd rather pay $10 for the print.
I don't see a value in ePub (or other electronic versions of books). I obviously see a value in print.
Edited to add: Point of clarification: I don't see the value of the ePub as a standalone entity, separate from the print. I definitely see a value as an ancillary product, and see a value of the product itself, just that I don't know that I'd buy the ePub if there wasn't a print version to go along with it.
Try keeping all your belongings and bed in a 10x10 room ... then you will see the tangible value of eBooks
Climate-controlled storage units with 24x7 access aren't horribly expensive. :D
But, sure, I can see how some people can see an increased value in them.
Depending on the content, some electronic media has a greater value to me (i.e. Pathfinder RPG PDFs vs. Pathfinder Tales ePubs).
Ultimately, though, I'd rather have print over electronic.
For the vast majority of books, I'd much rather have a digital copy than a physical one - the argument for storage space needed for a large collection of books is certainly a valid one, in my opinion. It's just much more convenient than physical copies - I can charge my Kindle before going on vacation and bring my entire library of books in a device I can fit in a pocket. And if I forget to take my Kindle somewhere, I can read on my phone, continuing right from the spot I was at in the Kindle, and then having it synch back when I switch devices again. Furthermore, my Kindle can hold thousands of books, so the moment I finish one, I can get started on another - and as long as I have an internet connection, I can quickly find and buy a new book, and start reading that within a minute.
Yeah, I like the way a book feels to the touch, but if it's a book I was most likely going to buy a cheap paperback version of anyway, I see no reason to pick one over a digital version. The convenience of not having to go to a bookstore (and in my town - nay, my country - bookstores are terrible unless you're only interested in reading new books from popular authors) or order a book online and wait however long it will take for the order to be processed, shipped, and then be at the mercy of the postal system. Instead, I can find it on Amazon's online store, one-click-purchase, and it's on my device right away. That convenience makes it worth paying just as much for an e-book as for a paperback. I'll save my physical book purchases for collectibles, like the leather bound copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels I've got, my collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories, and so on - and Pathfinder books, of course.
I don't see a value in ePub (or other electronic versions of books). I obviously see a value in print.What you're implying then is that the value is in the medium, not the content, despite the fact that the content represents a lot more work.
It's a mix of both, but, yes - the content in digital format has less value than the content in physical format.
Beyond the fact that I have a tangible object, I have rights with the physical format that I don't with the digital format.
I's a crime to take the physical format from me without permission, whereas it's a civil issue to take the digital format from me without permission.
The legality of reselling my physical copy is quite clear, whereas the content creators are going out of their way to muddy the legality of whether or not I can resell my digital copy.
The list goes on and on...
Kindle has a lending library as well, via Amazon, where you can borrow, for free, something like 150K different books.
Other than not having to go to a library, this really isn't any kind of huge development.
Further, it's not even on-par with owning the eBook yourself.
In reference to the Kindle lending library, I think you can only borrow one title per month.
From the public library standpoint, they can only loan out however many copies they buy, so...if it's already "out", you have to wait.
Can't wait until they charge late fees for eBooks...
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So here we are almost a year later, the USDOJ won, a settlement was reached, and prices were supposed to go down, or at least seem reasonable...
The Burning City, which I bought in paperback 13 years ago for $6 is a $25 ebook?!?
Star Trek Vanguard: Whirlwind, which I bought five years ago for $7 is now a $25 ebook!?!
And this 14 year old STTNG novel is $12?!?!?!?
I can still find these in paperback at B&N for their original prices.
I can still find these in paperback at B&N for their original prices.
The Burning City, which I bought in paperback 13 years ago for $6 is a $25 ebook?!?
Hardcover, used, starting at $0.01 plus $3.99 shipping.
Mass Market Paperpack, used, starting at $0.01 plus $3.99 shipping.Star Trek Vanguard: Whirlwind, which I bought five years ago for $7 is now a $25 ebook!?!
Mass Market Paperback, used, starting at $1.49 plus $3.99 shipping.
And this 14 year old STTNG novel is $12?!?!?!?
Paperback, used, starting at $1.87 plus $3.99 shipping.
Mass Market Paperback, used, starting at $0.01 plus $3.99 shipping.I agree, it's ridiculous. How much are previously-been-read Kindle versions?
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I have a bit of insight onto the cost and pricing of books. I was a business analyst for a mid-sized academic publisher for a few years, although it was before the ebook market took off.
This thread is mainly about price collusion and unfair trade practices, but by inference, this also gets to the topic of what constitutes a fair price in the absence of such collusion.
Academic publishing is a bit different than the mainstream market, but does some have similarities to the market for gaming materials. In Academic publishing, the person making the decision about purchasing a book is not the same person who is buying the book. If a professor adopts a book for her class, it is the student who ends up buying it. In the gaming world, there is a slight analogy, in that a game master makes a lion's share of the decisions about what books are usable, which tends to push players toward the purchase of particular products.
A bit before I started working with the publisher, there was a major impact on the business model for a book, which was the growth of an organized and efficient used text book market. The effect of this was that the sales life of a book was reduced considerably. The result was a more rapid revision cycle of textbooks by publishers. If you've been a college student in the past 20 years or so, you've seen book prices rise substantially and the window in which a text book has a resale value shrink. All of this is a result of the changes in the resale market.
The price of a book is determined by the market for a book. It's only relationship to the cost of a book is in the business decision with respect to how many books of a given book to publish and the decision about whether to publish at all.
The company I worked for sold directly to customers as well as to bookstores and distributors. The maximum discount vs. the direct sale price was about 40%; this isn't necessarily reflective of every type of publisher. The printing cost of a book, as has been noted elsewhere in this thread, is pretty small, often between 3-10% of the book's price. Distribution costs for a book operation often run at a profit; publishers make money on the distribution costs. I think the part of this that people looking at ebooks don't necessarily understand is that there is a substantial upfront cost for book publication with respect to the editorial production of the book..basically getting the book from manuscript to a printable version.
From the publishers' perspective, an ebook can be an awkward product. All of the pre-publication costs are the same or greater than a physical book. If the book is published both in physical and ebook versions, there is the upfront cost, plus the addition of preparing the book for its ebook version. That ebook version often involves the use of higher cost labor due to the technical skills. Because book publishers make money on distribution costs, an ebook can end up being more expensive from the publishers' perspective than a physical book.
I never worked with trade press books. However, what you typically see is a book being released in hardback, and only later in paperback. Essentially what is being done here is to wring the maximum price out the most motivated buyers, with the paperback riding on the invested upfront costs to capture additional revenue from customers who are less motivated. Finally, you see residual inventory sold through remainderer at a steep discount. If you've ever been caught up in a current book series, you've faced the decision about whether to buy a book when it's only available in hardback or wait for the paperback. If you read like most gamers, you've also bought books that you otherwise wouldn't buy at a remainderer retail operation or from a used book store. When you buy a hardback you are paying for the opportunity to have it first, and readily available. Contrast that with a used book store, where you get a great price, but you can't be guaranteed to get the product you want. You've seen this in action.
I suspect that part of what is going on is that the ebook market is seen by publishers as motivated buyers. If you read ebooks, you have invested in a Kindle or whatever and almost feel compelled to buy additional content to help justify why you have it. In other words, ebook pricing is more akin to the hardback market than to the paperback or remainderer market. You might see vast differences in prices between a current title an one in the public domain or is otherwise has been around for a long time primarily because the competition for the ebook version lies in the piles used books in a used book retail operation.
None of this really addresses the lawsuit or what has followed. I'm not really up to speed with that. Rather, I'm just laying out some of what is seen from the publisher side of the fence. Admittedly, the publishing industry is still in the process of making the transition into the electronic age, changing mores related to ownership, licensing, perceptions related to intellectual property, etc. What we're seeing in the lawsuit, its' fallout, discussions about value, etc. are pains of transition between the ending age of printed media and the new age of digital media.
I'll end an admittedly long post with a short story told by a couple of executives at the publishing company I used to work at: They were finishing up a visit with representives from a bank and were showing off the warehouse. We're talking about 25k square feet of high rise storage holding a couple of million books. As they finished, the banker thanked them for the presentation and commented on the warehouse, "I know when you walk this warehouse, you are seeing your inventory and the product you're going to sell. What I see is used paper."
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@Howie--The books I mentioned in yesterday's post are all quite old, are still available in paperback for under $8 (though they've been reissued in trade paperback very recently), and until the reissue, were all available for Kindle at reasonable prices of $5-$7.
I had already purchased the STTNG novel for Kindle a year ago for $5 and change. I wanted to see if the current very expensive e-edition was somehow different and wanted to see a preview--an Amazon message pops up that says I already own this book. That tells me there's no difference in the files, and suggests that the e-price was set based on the new trade re-release.
I fully understand S&S re-releasing older books for a new generation of readers, it's a great way to re-energize the arguably lagging ST novel line, and as a collector I actually like the trade-versions better than the mass-market pbks--Black Library is doing this now with their Warhammer novels, and I'm very pleased with the oversized reissues--but BL still sells the e-editions at the old mass-market price.
I'm just complaining.
In the UK, the physical cost of production for a book (paper, shipping, storage, returns) amounts to approximately 13% of the cost of a typical hardcover (which is £20). Remove that and the cost of the book should come down by 13%, right?
Unfortunately not. In the UK physical books are not liable for VAT (our version of sales tax) but e-books are. VAT is 20% of the cover price. So, in the UK, ebooks were for a long time more expensive than the equivalent paper copies, which was insane. Publishers have now mostly reduced the prices to less, but that has left them (and the authors) out of pocket.
Ebooks are great for indie, self-publishing authors, they are great for the mega-sellers and they are great for the customer. For the publishers and most of the midlist authors, making them work to make sense and make everyone enough money to live on is turning out to be much harder than was ever anticipated.
In the UK, the physical cost of production for a book (paper, shipping, storage, returns) amounts to approximately 13% of the cost of a typical hardcover (which is £20). Remove that and the cost of the book should come down by 13%, right?
Does this account for the markup that distribution and retail takes, as well?
Unfortunately not. In the UK physical books are not liable for VAT (our version of sales tax) but e-books are. VAT is 20% of the cover price. So, in the UK, ebooks were for a long time more expensive than the equivalent paper copies, which was insane. Publishers have now mostly reduced the prices to less, but that has left them (and the authors) out of pocket.
In what way?
The 13% figure you quote above is roughly accurate in the US, under the general assumption of 100% markups at each stage:
Printer spends X to print, charges 2X to Publisher
Publisher charges 4X to Distributor
Distributor Charges 8X to Retailer
Retailer Charges 16X to Customer
That 2X is 12.5% of retail price, so yeah, about 13%.
Quite honestly, I can't see how charging less for an eBook means the publisher (we'll talk about the author in a moment) makes less money than selling a print book to distribution for 25% of retail.
eBooks eliminate the print cost (roughly 6.25% of the retail cost), and eliminate the cuts taken by distribution and retail. At that point, the eBook-selling publisher is reaping all of the profit that those other entities would be receiving.
Obviously, there's still a cost associated with producing the eBook, but one can't argue that this cost would in any way exceed the cost of producing a print book.
Really, I can only see a couple semi-valid reasons for not wanting to charge less for eBooks than the retail price of print versions"
To attempt to reinforce the notion that you're paying 100% for content, and that format is irrelevant.
To not compete with themselves (i.e. eBook over retail book). Keeping both formats at retail price parity means you can't be accused of trying to undersell your distribution/retail partners.
Ebooks are great for indie, self-publishing authors, they are great for the mega-sellers and they are great for the customer. For the publishers and most of the midlist authors, making them work to make sense and make everyone enough money to live on is turning out to be much harder than was ever anticipated.
For the publisher, eBooks are an excellent revenue stream that doesn't cost them all that much more work (considering that they have the content already, and it's prepared in a print-ready format, just needing some additional processing for the electronic format).
For the author, giving up your eBook publishing rights is a rather bad idea these days. Michael Stackpole and a few other folks have extensively discussed why authors should retain the eBook rights to their works, and not include them when selling a book.
I'm sorry, I just cannot get with the notion that selling eBooks (at a discount of print retail or otherwise) in any way results in a negative impact to the publisher or author.
Does this account for the markup that distribution and retail takes, as well?
Yes, it's the percentage of the total, final cover price.
In what way?
As I said, in the UK ebooks are taxed; paper books are not because they are exempt. So in the UK you have to sell your ebook for more than the paper book to make the same amount of money. If you sell your ebook for less than the paperback or even the same amount, then you are losing that money versus the other format.
How it works in the USA, I don't know (each state has a different sales tax, right?), but VAT is a problem in the book market here. Another problem is that ebook sales are still making up a small amount of the market (only 10% compared to almost 15% in the USA, and the USA market is five times bigger to start with), meaning that publishers can't make up the difference by simply shifting megatons of ebooks as the e-reader market hasn't really taken off here yet.
For the author, giving up your eBook publishing rights is a rather bad idea these days. Michael Stackpole and a few other folks have extensively discussed why authors should retain the eBook rights to their works, and not include them when selling a book.
Hugh Howey was able to do that because he was negotiating from a position of strength. Others could do that, but certainly not new authors just starting out. If you tried that, the publishers simply wouldn't publish your book.
If Stackpole's managed to do that (and I could believe it; he's sold millions of books across numerous different franchises), all power to him. If you can do that, it's certainly worth doing.
For the publisher, eBooks are an excellent revenue stream that doesn't cost them all that much more work (considering that they have the content already, and it's prepared in a print-ready format, just needing some additional processing for the electronic format).
For new books, yes. For older books, they need to be scanned and then be thoroughly proof-read, as the scanning process often results in spelling mistakes and line breaks (some old ebooks were produced in this way and were shocking). That does incur additional costs.
I'm sorry, I just cannot get with the notion that selling eBooks (at a discount of print retail or otherwise) in any way results in a negative impact to the publisher or author.
As long as the discount is relatively modest, to account for the fairly minor, inferior cost of physical production versus ebooks, that's not a problem. The problem is that a lot of people seem to think that ebooks should be a lot less than paperback prices, which isn't borne out by the production costs, which are modest.
Amanda Hocking is a millionaire now. She sold her books exclusively in ebook format through Amazon for $1.99.
Yes, but Hocking did all of the work on them. She was writer, editor, copy-editor, proof-reader, advertiser and marketer all in one. As I understand it, her books are also extremely short, meaning she could do all of that work on a book and keep up a regular release schedule. For a larger publisher, that is not viable. They have entire departments doing this stuff which needs to be paid for.
Arguably they could ditch all of that and get the authors to do that instead, but then people would be complaining at length at having to wait 3 years for a new Terry Pratchett novel rather than 1, or 7 years for a new George R.R. Martin rather than 5 (J.R.R. Tolkien spent over two years of the eleven years spent writing LORD OF THE RINGS purely editing and typing the thing up before he even showed the completed book to his publisher).
I'm happy to pay $8 for an ebook. Publishers can't make a profit out of $8? It's not like they're forking over 70% of the profits to the author.
No, but the other departments need to get paid. And they certainly can make a profit out of selling mega-sellers at $8 a pop, but not the midlist. There's also the issue that publishers will sometimes subsidise experimental or 'quirky' novels out of the profits of other books.
There's certainly a conversation worth having about how outdated the publishing model is, and how it needs to get moving with the times and how indie authors are (even if to often overstated degrees) showing how antiquated the whole thing is, but right now the big publishers are approaching the whole ebook thing cautiously because the prices people are expecting from ebooks are often unrealistic compared to the cost of production, a problem intensified by comparisons with the indie authors pumping books out for $2 a pop with almost none of the overheads of a big publisher.
As I said, in the UK ebooks are taxed; paper books are not because they are exempt. So in the UK you have to sell your ebook for more than the paper book to make the same amount of money. If you sell your ebook for less than the paperback or even the same amount, then you are losing that money versus the other format.
As long as the discount is relatively modest, to account for the fairly minor, inferior cost of physical production versus ebooks, that's not a problem. The problem is that a lot of people seem to think that ebooks should be a lot less than paperback prices, which isn't borne out by the production costs, which are modest.
Sure, the actual cost of manufacture of a print version of a book is modest compared to the retail price, but this line of thought seems to ignore that the seller of the eBook is capturing revenue that they never received from selling the physical book:
Specifically, the publisher does not get a cut of the sale between distribution and retail, nor do they get a cut of the sale between retail and end customer.
So, the "problem" that a lot of people seem to think that eBooks should cost significantly less than paperback may not be borne out by production costs, but they ARE borne out by the elimination of production costs AND markups at the distribution and retail sales points.
The "printing the book is such a small part of the overall cost" argument comes up a lot, from a lot of folks, and it's really disingenuous (not directing this at you, specifically), because it tries to ignore that there's no distribution or retail aspect involved - unless you're selling your eBook through a 3rd party, like Amazon, of course.
Even then, how much of a cut is Amazon or Apple taking these days? Last I heard, it was 30%.
For the sake of discussion, let's assume that's their cut, and the publisher is selling the eBook for the same price as the print book:
In the print model, the publisher gets about 25% of the cover price, and has to pay both the development costs and the print costs.
In the eBook model, the publisher gets about 70% of the cover price, and has to pay the development costs.
This is why some feel that eBooks should be significantly cheaper than their print counterparts.
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There's this trend of reprints issued in traditional oversized or trade paperback formats-- this is fine I suppose, but what's irritating is when the e-version was $5 yesterday, but today, after the reissue of the physical format as a $16 trade paperback, the exact same e-version is 'discounted' to $12! That's a serious WTF to me, especially since the only work involved for the publisher was in changing the price.
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In a certain sense e-books are just a product like any other. The price is set by what people will pay. Soda costs 1 cent or something to make but sells for $2 at fast food places. Everyone is fine with that. A better example because it involves and evolved product would be automobiles. 30 years ago they were made of steel and put together by people. Now they are made of plastic and put together by robots. Yet cars cost roughly the same. The only reason this is even an issue is because we have people today that grew up with physical books and now see e-books and have trouble understanding how something that lacks physicality can cost the same as a physical object. Our kids won't even think twice about this.
In another sense, e-books should cost more than actual books as there is a much higher risk to publishers that the books will be passed around for free. One person with a pdf could spread it around to thousands (heck an unlimited amount) of people through the internet. That just isn't a problem with physical books.
The only reason this is even an issue is because we have people today that grew up with physical books and now see e-books and have trouble understanding how something that lacks physicality can cost the same as a physical object.
Only reason? Far from it.
I strongly encourage you to read up on the first-sale doctrine.
When I buy a print book, I have certain rights to it that cannot be taken away from me.
Chief amongst those is that I can re-sell my book.
This is not a right that typically exists when it comes to a solely electronic medium, and many publishers who are actively opposed to a secondary market are happier than a pig in mud that you have virtually no rights to the electronic content you've purchased - sorry, LICENSED.
Amazon has already removed purchased content from people's devices. "Escrow" style content sellers (such as RPGnow) have removed content from people's digital vaults.
Your "license" to a work prohibits you from re-selling it if you don't like it, don't want it, etc. It typically prohibits you from sharing your e-Property.
This is NOT a good thing for the public at large.
That's beyond the fact that with a print book, I actually have tangible item that, regardless of how little or how much it cost to produce, DOES have a production cost, which, at the very least, out to be discounted off of an e-Version that has no physical production element.
E-Book prices at parity with print book pricing is beyond ridiculous - you're paying far more and getting far less out of the deal.
In another sense, e-books should cost more than actual books as there is a much higher risk to publishers that the books will be passed around for free. One person with a pdf could spread it around to thousands (heck an unlimited amount) of people through the internet. That just isn't a problem with physical books.
No. HELL no.
Charging honest customers for the misdeeds of potential dishonest customers?
If you want to pay for that, go right ahead, but that is the WORST defense for the ridiculous price of e-Books imaginable.
Further, this is most certainly a problem with physical books. To use our own RPG hobby as an example, some folks seem to have no technical hurdles to scanning and OCR'ing a print book into PDF format and then distributing it.
WotC's yanking of PDFs didn't stop subsequent books (that were never produced or officially distributed in PDF format) from getting distributed all over the place.
There were homemade e-Books being distributed of print books YEARS before the publishers/copyright holders were producing/selling them, and if publishers/copyright holders weren't producing/selling them today, they'd exist anyways.
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Brian, I'm not saying you are wrong we are simply talking about two different things. You are talking about fairness and value. I am not. I am talking about how times change. 50 years ago we rented phones from the phone company. Even more recently TV used to be free over the air like radio. Now practically everyone pays for what used to be "free". Some people even pay for radio, something that I don't understand but could be normal in the future. The electronic frontier presents new challenges. If a publisher chooses to limit its product or charge the same as a physical book, the publisher is not "wrong", it is simply making a choice. It remains to be seen which choice will work best. Cheap and easy to pass around or expensive and easy to pass around or expensive and hard to pass around...etc. In 10 years one of these models will have been most successful and that will be that. That is all I am trying to say.
We rented phones from the phone company under the justification that un-official devices would "damage" the service. The phone company was smacked, told that they were wrong, and that ceased to be required.
TV is still free over-the-air, like radio. In fact, today, there's far more free over-the-air programming than there was prior to cable television, and a lot of it's even HD. People paying for cable or streaming services are paying for the same thing (in general) that they were paying for back when cable first became available - more/better/different.
Some people pay for radio because that service gets them something more, better or different than they can get for free.
When a publisher charges the same for an e-Book as they do a print book, they're, well, wrong. They're shafting their customer base, and they're trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the buying public. Too few people realize what they're losing, and allowing the publishers to get away with this erosion of rights simply due to the shift in delivery medium.
The digital format certainly has value, but is that value commensurate with the value of the analog format?
If a publisher chooses to limit its product or charge the same as a physical book, the publisher is not "wrong", it is simply making a choice.
And their choice leaves me with a choice to make (am I willing to pay what they're asking) and the results of that choice (en masse) are funneled back to the publisher so that they can contemplate the consequences of their choice.
If I understand correctly, this is the way the market works, and e-books will find their level, like anything else. However, combined with the "perceived value is value" argument that has been made upthread, I'm not sure the level e-books find is going to leave the publishers happy.