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The JPEG analogy doesn't hold water. The JPEG is a lossy reproduction of the original painting. But following that path, the lossier reproduction of the autho
by tripa 16y ago
The JPEG analogy doesn't hold water. The JPEG is a lossy reproduction of the original painting. But following that path, the lossier reproduction of the author's ideas is not the e-book: it's still the paper one.
(I still do agree with your naïve price model)
- nagrom 16y agoTh JPG analogy does hold water - for a perfect ebook reproduction of the text, use a TIFF or bitmap or similar. However, often an ebook is a lossy reproduction - look at the reviews for Surface Detail on Amazon. The quality of the text is below that of the published books (there are sections missing, large gaps in the text, inappropriate hyphenation and missing chapter breaks), and the ebook is more expensive than the hardcover! It seems like the publishers are acting against their own best interests in the matter of ebooks, just like the music publishers acted against their own interests with music downloads. I agree with posters who claim that the books will be published eventually at market price; our problem is that the market is very slow to stabilise and we must suffer from inefficiencies in the market while it stabilises. The publishers seem to be the major reason for the slowness of the market and that's why people have a gripe with them.
- dagw 16y agoTh JPG analogy does hold water People buying a Picasso painting are paying for the scarcity of the physical artifact, not for the pretty picture. A more reasonable comparison would be to compare the price of a poster of a Picasso painting with a Tiff of a high enough resolution to reproduce that poster. And I'll bet you in that scenario the poster is cheaper.
- nagrom 16y agoAnd, just like the case of ebooks, few people think that it's worth buying the images. Instead they torrent them. The market is broken.