4 ms·
+1 for paying for good information, which is what the author Yuval Harari recommends. He asks why we are willing to pay for high quality food, clothes etc., but
by madiator 4y ago
+1 for paying for good information, which is what the author Yuval Harari recommends. He asks why we are willing to pay for high quality food, clothes etc., but not for high quality information.
- creata 4y agoBut the answer is obvious, isn't it? Information is almost free to reproduce. Food, clothes, etc. are not. I'm not saying that's why information should be free, but that's why most people expect it to be free.
- fma 4y agoInformation might be free to reproduce, but it's not free to produce.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 4y agoAnd people in general probably seriously underestimate the cost of production vs. reproduction. I'm pretty sure the average person thinks the costs associated with a physical book are a lot higher than an ebook and they really aren't--at least for a book involving editors, etc.
- decross 4y agoDo you have a good source on that? I have been looking around for these kinds of costs and found nothing I could trust.
- ghaff 4y agoI've seen various figures of the years, e.g. https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-printed-books/ https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-prin... But all the figures I've seen suggest that printing/distribution/remainders/etc. are in the low single digits so that even if you ignore any of the costs that are unique to ebooks, there is no reason for ebooks (or for that matter paperbacks) to be significantly cheaper than hardcovers other than price discrimination. Even before ebooks, it used to be standard for hardcovers to sell at list price for a year or so at which point they came out as paperbacks selling for maybe half the price.
- decross 4y agoHmm. What about storage, delivery, returns, etc.? Quote from your source: "Now, I think they’ve underestimated the costs of shipping and warehousing books, and the tremendous cost of accepting returns (for full credit) of unsold books by bookstores — sometimes paying for return shipping, sometimes having the books simply destroyed, and other times selling them in bargain bins for a fraction of the cover price."
- spencerchubb 4y agoInformation has a non-zero cost for the first unit, and zero cost for each unit thereafter. In other words, marginal cost is zero. These types of goods are hard to find a market equilibrium for.
- ghaff 4y agoI'm not sure that's true. You're describing just about every SaaS out there. (Yes, there's some per customer cost of resources and sales/support but in general relatively little compared to initial and ongoing development.) What is true however is that you need to be able to prevent people from acquiring your product/service for that very low or zero marginal cost.
- oq_pmg 4y agoThat's it - ongoing development. You should constantly invest in the development of your SaaS product, unlike the example with the books
- ItsMonkk 4y agoPaul Samuelson[0] makes the argument here[1] when discussing how lighthouse economics works that anything with zero marginal costs that has a price other than free is by definition an economic loss. Therefore you should find other ways to fund lighthouses, and by extension, all media and software. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson [1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph