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Yes, that is an excellent point. Although, in a lot of cases, photocopying a book requires significant labor, with much lower guarantee of quality and I've rare
by bdhe 15y ago
Yes, that is an excellent point. Although, in a lot of cases, photocopying a book requires significant labor, with much lower guarantee of quality and I've rarely seen people making a business out of photocopying novels. For technical books, on the other hand, things get much more complicated. I understand prices are higher because circulation is typically much lower.
However, that leads me to another question: Must we always look at analogies from the past and work with them? The beauty of new technologies is that they're better than the old ones we had. It might take a lot more work, but it is much better to look at things afresh rather than falling back on old structures and status quo. The reason IP is so contentious is precisely because of this. We do not have anything to fall back on and must device probably completely new and arbitrary rules. Clearly it is in the publishers best interest to stick to status quo as much as possible and try to find analogies to old models so that it might be easier to justify a system in place that guarantees a revenue stream. But for the consumer, it is not obvious why this must be the case. In fact, the whole notion of publisher itself was a solution to a problem that technology has now (seemingly) solved.
- Apocryphon 15y agoBut if you lend someone a copy that they could keep indefinitely, the creator doesn't get paid for that copy. Isn't that simple enough?
- bdhe 15y agoWhat if you price it in such a way that lending someone a copy allows them to still pay the creator? You do realize that you as a creator are taking advantage of the medium to distribute your creation in much more efficient ways, yet, you don't want to give the privilege of the abilities of the medium to the consumer. It is this asymmetry that fundamentally perplexes me (to which I have no satisfactory answer).
- esrauch 15y agoI don't see any reason for this to perplex you. The dead tree model is well established; enough people are willing to pay for their own copy so that they don't have to go through the annoyance of lending. One of the abilities of ebooks is that there is essentially zero duplication cost. That means that (outside of legal and DRM) there would be absolutely no reason for anyone to ever pay for a book instead of getting it for free. I would actually say that there is very little advantage of ebooks to an author; piracy is suddenly an actual problem instead of something that would be laughable (how many pirate paper backs do people own?), people suddenly can't lose your book meaning they will only purchase it once, and most importantly you lose the entirety of the extra profits from hardcover editions (the price of hardcover versus paperbacks is not really from the cost to produce). Publishers are clearly going to be decimated by self publishing becoming more viable for up and coming authors. The efficiency of not having to print actual books, ship them, etc is nothing compared to these other factors. The real reason why they have to sell ebooks is because customers are demanding them, and would buy their competitors books if they didn't offer digital editions. Almost nothing about ebooks is actually positive to publishers or established authors. They are the horseshoe manufacturers and the model T has just been invented; just because they start making tires doesn't mean that they wouldn't be much happier if cars had never become invented.