3 ms·

I've only been in a mall twice in the last 5 years. However, point taken. The issue I have with DRM however, is fundamentally different. When someone steals

I've only been in a mall twice in the last 5 years. However, point taken. The issue I have with DRM however, is fundamentally different. When someone steals a piece of tangible merchandise, the store is out because they actually borrowed money to purchase that merchandise up front, and has to eat the cost. There is no rational argument that can setup an equivalent with digital media. Additionally, There is absolutely no reason any ebook should cost more than $10 when the hardcover is available for $16-$20. Yes there is overhead in providing these items for download, but much of that overhead is directly tied to keep people from stealing it. Neat, so take $3 off the price of your ebook and more people will be willing to buy it.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
"Additionally, There is absolutely no reason any ebook should cost more than $10 when the hardcover is available for $16-$20." The price is what the market will bear, period. As to manufacturing costs, the cost of producing a hardcover book and a mass-market paperback are negligible, the prices of those editions are not set based on cost of production but on time of availability. Book pricing is fundamentally broken right now. And the vast majority of authors do not make a reasonable income from their work. Books are priced as commodities, the same as you might see prices for fruit or vegetables in the supermarket. The way that authors make the most money is by milking high demand for their books from the early buyers through hardcover sales. This is why the hardcover comes out first at a higher price, because there's a lot more profit built into the earliest release. But readers would find it unfair if the paperback edition came out first and cost 2x as much as normal paperbacks for the first several months. The perception of value of hardbacks offsets this feeling, even though the price of hardback editions usually falls down to only a few dollars more than the paperback after a while. Much the same as 1st class / coach class on airplanes, the higher paying customers help subsidize the lower paying customers. However, there is no hardback/paperback differentiator in eBooks. If the eBook price is lowered a few dollars relative to the paperback and eBooks become the dominant form of book then authors and publishers are faced with a crisis, the inability to make a profit on books. Keeping eBook prices close to paperback books helps solve the problem somewhat because the lower cost of production allows for a higher profit margin, though not as high as for hardbacks. Ultimately, it's not the wad of pressed wood pulp that readers value, per se, but the content itself, so there is a reasonable justification that the paperback price should be the price floor for any edition of the book, regardless of media. So far this seems to have held, as today's eBook pricing still results in very lively sales. It remains to be seen what the ultimate answer is to this crisis, but it's important to recognize the seriousness of it.
tptacek 16y ago
Book publishers make enough money off the title to produce _Freedom: A Novel_ by John Franzen in hardcover at $15. By your logic, they have no business charging $75 for Harris' _Trading and Exchanges_ (a bible of market microstructure); Harris' book has a comparable number of pages and the same binding. You are essentially advocating for fiat pricing, and against the market. You can make a consistent argument based on that, but it will wildly mismatch the way pretty much all of western civilization works.
- cullenking 16y ago
  I should clarify: I don't mean to say I want pricing to be flat by any means, even if my original post implied it. What I meant to say is that the ebook is not cheaper than the paperback or the hardcover. Example: Cryptonomicon is $8.99 as a softcover, but, the ebook version is $10.99
  - tptacek 16y ago
    I didn't say "flat". I said "fiat". As in, there's a marketwide rule about what book prices "should" be. It is not an economic injustice that the ebook Cryptonomicon costs more than the softcover.
    - davidw 16y ago
      > It is not an economic injustice that the ebook Cryptonomicon costs more than the softcover. No, but perhaps it is a sign of a screwy market. Or simply a new market that hasn't really stabilized yet.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - tptacek 16y ago
        The notion that things on computers are less "real" than things in the real world is one of my pet moral crusades; probably not surprising given my background. With that in mind: I don't start from the premise that ebooks should cost less than paper books. In particular, ebook versions of reference works are more valuable in electronic form.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

"Additionally, There is absolutely no reason any ebook should cost more than $10 when the hardcover is available for $16-$20." The price is what the market will bear, period. As to manufacturing costs, the cost of producing a hardcover book and a mass-market paperback are negligible, the prices of those editions are not set based on cost of production but on time of availability. Book pricing is fundamentally broken right now. And the vast majority of authors do not make a reasonable income from their work. Books are priced as commodities, the same as you might see prices for fruit or vegetables in the supermarket. The way that authors make the most money is by milking high demand for their books from the early buyers through hardcover sales. This is why the hardcover comes out first at a higher price, because there's a lot more profit built into the earliest release. But readers would find it unfair if the paperback edition came out first and cost 2x as much as normal paperbacks for the first several months. The perception of value of hardbacks offsets this feeling, even though the price of hardback editions usually falls down to only a few dollars more than the paperback after a while. Much the same as 1st class / coach class on airplanes, the higher paying customers help subsidize the lower paying customers. However, there is no hardback/paperback differentiator in eBooks. If the eBook price is lowered a few dollars relative to the paperback and eBooks become the dominant form of book then authors and publishers are faced with a crisis, the inability to make a profit on books. Keeping eBook prices close to paperback books helps solve the problem somewhat because the lower cost of production allows for a higher profit margin, though not as high as for hardbacks. Ultimately, it's not the wad of pressed wood pulp that readers value, per se, but the content itself, so there is a reasonable justification that the paperback price should be the price floor for any edition of the book, regardless of media. So far this seems to have held, as today's eBook pricing still results in very lively sales. It remains to be seen what the ultimate answer is to this crisis, but it's important to recognize the seriousness of it.

tptacek 16y ago

Book publishers make enough money off the title to produce _Freedom: A Novel_ by John Franzen in hardcover at $15. By your logic, they have no business charging $75 for Harris' _Trading and Exchanges_ (a bible of market microstructure); Harris' book has a comparable number of pages and the same binding. You are essentially advocating for fiat pricing, and against the market. You can make a consistent argument based on that, but it will wildly mismatch the way pretty much all of western civilization works.

cullenking 16y ago
I should clarify: I don't mean to say I want pricing to be flat by any means, even if my original post implied it. What I meant to say is that the ebook is not cheaper than the paperback or the hardcover. Example: Cryptonomicon is $8.99 as a softcover, but, the ebook version is $10.99
- tptacek 16y ago
  I didn't say "flat". I said "fiat". As in, there's a marketwide rule about what book prices "should" be. It is not an economic injustice that the ebook Cryptonomicon costs more than the softcover.
  - davidw 16y ago
    > It is not an economic injustice that the ebook Cryptonomicon costs more than the softcover. No, but perhaps it is a sign of a screwy market. Or simply a new market that hasn't really stabilized yet.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - tptacek 16y ago
      The notion that things on computers are less "real" than things in the real world is one of my pet moral crusades; probably not surprising given my background. With that in mind: I don't start from the premise that ebooks should cost less than paper books. In particular, ebook versions of reference works are more valuable in electronic form.