4 ms·
>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 s
by 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.