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This service would have the extremely interesting effect of replacing itself with all your reading sources. Consider: Given a choice between buying a book elsew
by makmanalp 12y ago
This service would have the extremely interesting effect of replacing itself with all your reading sources. Consider: Given a choice between buying a book elsewhere and reading it here, you're going to choose the latter because it's free. But also, if you normally read a book per month, since you're paying for it whether you read or not, you'd have to basically read more from here to be able to make it "worth it". So given a choice between buying a book elsewhere or reading a different one here, you're still going to lean towards reading it here. Pretty smart!
- rahimnathwani 12y agoAre books fungible? If you're in a rich Western country, the time you spend reading a book probably has an opportunity cost much greater than the cost to acquire rights to read the book. Why would you spend 10 hours with a book whose marginal cost is $0, when you could pay $10 and spend those ten hours with a better book?
- makmanalp 12y agoWow, never thought of it that way. Although I don't think that'd factor in as much if there's books I want to read on both sides, which I assume is the case. So it's not so much an absolute ranking of books. If it's over a threshold, I want to read it. Given two books I want to read, it might not be that clear that I want to read one over the other, but when you add the cost difference it'd become clearer.