4 ms·

I'm curious why people think e-books should be so cheap? Many years of rhetoric about other industries' transitions from atoms to bits have left many with the

by GHFigs 17y ago

I'm curious why people think e-books should be so cheap? Many years of rhetoric about other industries' transitions from atoms to bits have left many with the mistaken impression that the price should gravitate toward the cost of moving and storing the bits rather than the value in their particular arrangement. The peak of this way of thinking was AllOfMP3, that dubiously legal Russian site that used to sell music by the megabyte. There were people who actually considered that fair and reasonable. Fortunately we're all a little more used to the idea of paying for bits these days, but the tendency to under-estimate their worth is persistent.

mmt 17y ago
the mistaken impression that the price should gravitate toward the cost of moving and storing the bits rather than the value in their particular arrangement I disagree that the impression was mistaken. I also disagree that it was rhetoric about digitization that produced such an impression. Even the word "publisher" means distributor, not content creator (or bit arranger, if you will). Consumers therefore have a reasonable expectation that the value they're paying for is the delivery of the content to them in a convenient fashion.
- GHFigs 17y ago
  I'm arguing for the portion of the bit-arranging that the publisher (or record label or movie studio) is responsible for. I think we tend to under-estimate that, probably for the simple reason that it is invisible to us. I'm not about to argue that they deserve every last cent they demand, though. Only that pricing should be dragged down kicking and streaming by what the market is willing to bear for the content and not encouraged to free-fall until it barely covers the cost of the bit-moving. As much as I may want cheap books, I can sympathize with a publisher's desire to not get bitch-slapped by the invisible hand. (Also: I'm usually opposed to meta-discussion about moderation, but I did want you to know that I am not the ass-hat that voted you to zero.)

by GHFigs 17y ago

mmt 17y ago

the mistaken impression that the price should gravitate toward the cost of moving and storing the bits rather than the value in their particular arrangement I disagree that the impression was mistaken. I also disagree that it was rhetoric about digitization that produced such an impression. Even the word "publisher" means distributor, not content creator (or bit arranger, if you will). Consumers therefore have a reasonable expectation that the value they're paying for is the delivery of the content to them in a convenient fashion.

GHFigs 17y ago
I'm arguing for the portion of the bit-arranging that the publisher (or record label or movie studio) is responsible for. I think we tend to under-estimate that, probably for the simple reason that it is invisible to us. I'm not about to argue that they deserve every last cent they demand, though. Only that pricing should be dragged down kicking and streaming by what the market is willing to bear for the content and not encouraged to free-fall until it barely covers the cost of the bit-moving. As much as I may want cheap books, I can sympathize with a publisher's desire to not get bitch-slapped by the invisible hand. (Also: I'm usually opposed to meta-discussion about moderation, but I did want you to know that I am not the ass-hat that voted you to zero.)