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Comment by latortuga | Hacker News Reader

This is a cost-centric view of the price, when a value-centric view may be more useful. The ebook can be downloaded and taken everywhere without having to lug and lose an extra item in your bag. The ebook can be read on multiple devices seamlessly. The ebook can be retrieved from the seller in the event you lose it.

And the content is the same, you're paying for the same work. So you are paying $2 more for a ton of increased convenience.

You can rent physical DVDs from the library for free. Yet you pay for Netflix. Such a greedy publisher, enabling us to do things more easily.

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I can sell my physical copy of the book or lend it to my friends once I am done reading. Where as the ebook is just a license for me to access its content which if the seller dies I lose access to that content. I personally would have lost $3-400 worth of ebooks that I had paid for if I didn't have the foresight to remove the drm and archive. I understand if the ebook is kept at hardback prices till the paperback comes out but charging more than the paperback is a bit much.

A decent number of eBooks are available DRM-Free (although I wish it were more common). If we were discussing DRM-Free eBooks exclusively, would that change your opinion?

Edit: I will add—as long as I end up with a DRM Free file, I don't personally care if the file came that way or not. But, to the extent that DRM Removal requires effort, I will consider that opportunity cost in addition to the price when deciding whether to purchase something.

Nearly all movies and TV shows I watch were purchased through iTunes, because TunesKit makes the DRM trivial to remove.

DRM free doesn't mean the reader software lets you take advantage of it.

I don't understand your point. Even if Kindle doesn't let you open DRM-Free epubs (no idea if this is the case or not) there is plenty of software that does.

Yes, Kindle was my point - it applies the same rules to everything even if the text says something to the effect of the publisher has released this free of DRM. You still can not copy and paste a passage of text, even though the publisher and fair use allow it.

Buy from somewhere that sells epubs, like Kobo. The Kindle Store uses Amazon's primary format regardless of whether or not a book has DRM.

To turn that around, one could argue the ebook has a lower value since it is easily pirated. It is competing with a version of itself that costs $0.00 and a few minutes of web searching.

Exactly. I can buy the ebook for $12 or for $10 I can buy the physical book, convince myself I've done right by the author, and download the ebook for free if I need it.

Given a choice between $0 and ~$12, it seems that many will choose $0. Even though that's illegal, hurts the author, and reduces the chances of future work from them.

The experiment described in TFA is pretty clearcut. She saturated the torrents with fakes, and more people bought authorized copies.

But another experiment would be more interesting. Cut the price of the ebook substantially, and look at aggregate sales. After all, the marginal cost of ebooks is ~$0. And downloading torrents is more hassle (and more risky) than buying from Amazon or whatever. Maybe there's a price point that would minimize piracy and maximize sales.

It was a near perfect experiment. She raised the price from $0 vs $12 to $0-plus-time-spent-finding-real-copy vs $12 and instantly saw the supply/demand curve move as it should.

We should absolutely expect any move off the $12 to cause a similar response. There is almost certainly a maximized price/units point on that curve somewhere below the $12... King's to the publisher brave enough to look for it first.

(It should be noted that its not just $12 right now either, its $12-plus-the-hassle-the-DRM-puts-you-thru).

Right. And it's also worth noting her comment that those increased sales helped her sell another series to the publisher.

And for what it's worth, this is basically how the music industry beat piracy.

The music industry "beat" piracy by providing a better, more convenient experience at a low monthly fee.

The publishing industry hasn't come close to this. In fact, they're most well-known for an illegal price fixing scheme.[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/apple-450...

Sorry to be unclear. I meant just that.

I'm not sure this is accurate - I used to download music and can count on one hand how many times I procured a deliberately bad file. Spotify represents a reasonably priced and convenient service that has the music I want.

I did recently bin my Spotify subscription owing to privacy concerns but have returned - it's a pain to build up a library and then put it somewhere accessible (sometimes offline in an era of devices that aren't as big as the iPod I used to have) and I was optimistic to think that the value-add would be trivially replicatable. The weekly playlists are excellent too, so currently I'm prepared to pay a monthly convenience fee. If that changed too dramatically, I'd probably move back to piracy.

Netflix is a good example of faltering here where Spotify succeeded - I know 99% of the time that the media I want to watch isn't available on their platform whereas that's an almost non-event with the latter. Convenience is something people will almost always pay for.

Yeah, I was unclear. I was referring to lowering prices, not introducing bad copies.

I'm not trying to debate whether an ebook or a physical book is better or worse and I feel like most in this thread have willfully misinterpreted that. My point was that if you consider just the cost of a good, you are likely to run into "how can this possibly be fair" scenarios. But cost isn't the only thing that factors into price, whether you like the good or not.

Ebooks and physical books have different uses, different distribution, different benefits, different downsides. They aren't identical and it's not surprising or unfair that they're priced differently.

I think what you're failing to understand that as consumers we decide what is fair to factor into price.

I understand how the "value argument" influences the initial price of a good, but once it is out in the market demand should be taken into account. If a product's supply is (practically) infinite and its demand is low, then the price should be low. Anything else smacks of poor business decision making or price fixing.

Consumers don't think in terms of positive value, if they consider value at all. They consider negative value. For example, consider why skim milk costs LESS than whole milk, even though skim milk is more expensive to produce. People feel they're not getting the fat in their milk, so they should pay less, not more. Same thing here. They're not getting a physical book.

What's more, it costs a publisher far less to produce and distribute an ebook. So there is legit no good explanation that a consumer will accept for a higher priced ebook.

> consider why skim milk costs LESS than whole milk, even though skim milk is more expensive to produce. ...

Isn't skim milk a side-product of making cream and butter, which is the "fat" part you mention? I understand your point, and the consumer side is definitely a factor in how jointly-made products are priced, but it isn't exactly irrational for it to cost less, even though it's made using whole milk as a feedstock.

No, I don't think skim milk is a byproduct of anything. With whole milk you can get whey and cheese. You can get butter and buttermilk. But skim milk has to be intentionally done. Im pretty sure.

It's kind of funny how this reality is never recognized, considering that basically the entire tech industry is composed of companies that charge based on value, not on cost.

I think it's the opposite - it's the reality of what goes into a price that's usually not recognized (because it's deliberately kept secret by the sellers). So when the price structure is partly revealed, such as in this case, people realize how they're being played.

At the same time, Digital goods usually accompany DRM, I can't sell it, I have to use the "approved" software/hardware to be able to read it (that isn't even mentioning what tracking accompanies the approved software/hardware). I think digital goods personally have much less value for those reasons.

Also, your local library gives you the ability to rent digital goods, in eBook and video form. I haven't tried audiobooks.

All ebook readers I ever used provided for me vastly inferior experience to simply holding a physical book. Using anything else than e-ink reader is downgrading experience even further onto 'if I have to' level.

Yes you can carry 1000 books around (a rather theoretical advantage in many cases), it is smaller (not necessarily lighter), and it has backlight. And no trees cut down. But - experience is not even equal.

Searching, copying text (for quoting or taking notes), bookmarks, higher fidelity images and figures, internal and external links, instant access to a new book I don't currently own or have with me are some of the more practical benefits.

Courses for horses, but I much prefer ebooks. Physical books seem so heavy to hold, and you can't adjust the font size.

In my (UK) experience, public libraries charge for lending DVDs.

But your main point is valid, I think: the cost-centric view only makes sense when there is a free market, while in the market for a particular book, or even, in most cases, for a particular author, the publisher has a monopoly. So, if the people who buy ebooks are willing to pay more, that is what happens.

As a consumer I care about a cost centric view.

If the ebook is higher than the book i'd likely pirate it out of principle.

When business becomes visible to the consumer you run the risk of the consumer not liking the business. Things like limited runs of e-books (fucking really?), charging more for e-books, or releasing paperback weeks before the ebook are all consumer visible business.

I don't see e-books as a convenience, I see them as a more cost effective and eco-friendly way to obtain books because you don't have to pay for the paper, the binding, the press, etc. In this view the value of an e-book comes from the fact its cheaper, trying to charge more for that removes the whole point.

But in a larger view, I have always looked at value based pricing as cancerous. I avoid phones without removable storage for this reason, I avoid apple products ever since I got my first apple product as a gift, for this reason.

The price of an item should be the cost of the item plus a modest profit margin. Anything past that is crony capitalism.

> You can rent physical DVDs from the library for free. Yet you pay for Netflix

That analogy doesn't really work for me because I pay for my library through my taxes.

And you would continue to pay for your library through your taxes regardless of whether or not you kept or cancelled your Netflix subscription.

Well... how can this work for people that have the exact opposite view on value?

Physical persistence of a book, is way more practical in the short, mid, long run; to me.

It's just an ideological way of making people buy in into setting high prices, not a thing that reflect reality.

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