3 ms·

> a kid on the budget I had as a kid would be restricted to texts written before 1923, and/or would resort to piracy. It's tough to beat the affordability of u

by ashark 10y ago

> a kid on the budget I had as a kid would be restricted to texts written before 1923, and/or would resort to piracy. It's tough to beat the affordability of used mass-market paperbacks—there are usually at least a few decent titles at Goodwill, where even the hardbacks are only a dollar—and our local library's ebook lending system takes about 50x as much time and effort to get you the book you want as piracy, and is so complicated that I can't see all but the most dedicated and tech-literate figuring it out. I understand ebooks, but I don't understand the ebook market. It all seems about 50-75% too expensive to even be an option, especially since you can't recoup some of the money by re-selling.

lsc 10y ago
>I understand ebooks, but I don't understand the ebook market. It all seems about 50-75% too expensive to even be an option, especially since you can't recoup some of the money by re-selling. It's great, I think, for consumers with money and for authors; I'm happy to pay the premium (in fact, amazon, are you listening? I'd pay like 5x as much for the device and pay your e-textbook prices if you made an e-paper display capable of dealing with math books. c'mon, how hard would it be to integrate LaTeX?) and the authors get a bigger cut. That's the thing about selling; often it makes more sense to only serve the top 10% at 10x the price than it does to serve the whole market. The problem is that it used to be that someone like me now buying a lot of books would result in those books being recycled out and sold to someone like me as a kid for very little money; It's that secondary market that suffers, and that secondary market, well, it's just not something that matters very much, if you measure in dollars and cents, because me as a kid had almost no money. The thing is, I think that secondary market was something of a social good; I have the disposable income now to pay extra for my books, in part because me-as-a-kid had access to those nearly free books.

by ashark 10y ago

lsc 10y ago

>I understand ebooks, but I don't understand the ebook market. It all seems about 50-75% too expensive to even be an option, especially since you can't recoup some of the money by re-selling. It's great, I think, for consumers with money and for authors; I'm happy to pay the premium (in fact, amazon, are you listening? I'd pay like 5x as much for the device and pay your e-textbook prices if you made an e-paper display capable of dealing with math books. c'mon, how hard would it be to integrate LaTeX?) and the authors get a bigger cut. That's the thing about selling; often it makes more sense to only serve the top 10% at 10x the price than it does to serve the whole market. The problem is that it used to be that someone like me now buying a lot of books would result in those books being recycled out and sold to someone like me as a kid for very little money; It's that secondary market that suffers, and that secondary market, well, it's just not something that matters very much, if you measure in dollars and cents, because me as a kid had almost no money. The thing is, I think that secondary market was something of a social good; I have the disposable income now to pay extra for my books, in part because me-as-a-kid had access to those nearly free books.