"the cost of transforming a marnpcuist into an e-book is next to nothing" has likely never tried it, or has seriously undervalued her time and effort. (The other possibility is that she is ok with really horrible typography.)I'm also not fond of the "I think you shouldn't be paying 10-12 bucks for something that costs next to nothing to do" argument. That uses the rhetorical sleight-of-hand of pretending one aspect of the cost is the entire cost. Yes, the marginal cost of producing an additional copy of an ebook is low, but the price of an ebook has to take into account more than just the marginal cost. It also has to take into account that writers, editors, copy-editors, artists, marketers and everyone else involved in creating the book deserve to be paid. If your typical book only sells several thousand copies, it can't be priced that low if everyone is to be paid enough so that they can afford to create the next book.Until people stop thinking of ebooks as lesser versions of books, it's hard to see why ebooks will be profitable in the general case. People expect that they should cost less than books even though, until we get to the point of making the first copy, ebooks incur all the same production costs as books.Yes, intellectual arguments on why people "should" value ebooks more don't do much good. People have an intuitive sense of an ebook's worth then they back their way into rationales that aren't always rational. I'm just saying that until we get to the point where people find ebooks desirable as thing unto themselves, they won't be able to carry their fair share of the production costs.

by Indry 12:19:29 AM 2013.10.24