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Comment by michael_dorfman | Hacker News Reader

Why, exactly, are they absurdly priced?

One would think that they, like all things, are in the process of being priced "correctly"-- that is to say, what the market will bear.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the production costs have should bear any relationship to the price. You don't price a Picasso based on the cost of the paint and canvas, do you?

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The absurd is that you're paying for electronic delivery more than for physical goods. It's like getting JPEG of Picasso's painting for more than the canvas.

I see price like this (naively perhaps):

Paper book:

    author's revenue + publisher's revenue + printing + shipping

e-book:

    author's revenue + publisher's revenue + 0 + ~0

From that POV e-book should always be cheaper than a paper book, and it has nothing to do with ripping off authors or publishers.

The JPEG analogy doesn't hold water. The JPEG is a lossy reproduction of the original painting. But following that path, the lossier reproduction of the author's ideas is not the e-book: it's still the paper one.

(I still do agree with your naïve price model)

Th JPG analogy does hold water - for a perfect ebook reproduction of the text, use a TIFF or bitmap or similar.

However, often an ebook is a lossy reproduction - look at the reviews for Surface Detail on Amazon. The quality of the text is below that of the published books (there are sections missing, large gaps in the text, inappropriate hyphenation and missing chapter breaks), and the ebook is more expensive than the hardcover!

It seems like the publishers are acting against their own best interests in the matter of ebooks, just like the music publishers acted against their own interests with music downloads. I agree with posters who claim that the books will be published eventually at market price; our problem is that the market is very slow to stabilise and we must suffer from inefficiencies in the market while it stabilises. The publishers seem to be the major reason for the slowness of the market and that's why people have a gripe with them.

Th JPG analogy does hold water

People buying a Picasso painting are paying for the scarcity of the physical artifact, not for the pretty picture.

A more reasonable comparison would be to compare the price of a poster of a Picasso painting with a Tiff of a high enough resolution to reproduce that poster. And I'll bet you in that scenario the poster is cheaper.

And, just like the case of ebooks, few people think that it's worth buying the images. Instead they torrent them. The market is broken.

Again, you're making the mistake of thinking that costs like printing or shipping have anything to do with it.

Saying an e-book should always be cheaper than a paper book is like saying that baseball tickets should always cost more than basketball tickets, because there are more players on the team.

The price of paper and ink and shipping has almost nothing at all to do with the price of books. Do you really think that hardcovers are that much more expensive to produce than paperbacks?

> One would think that they, like all things, are in the process of being priced "correctly"-- that is to say, what the market will bear.

I think that "in the process of" is critical. It hasn't yet stabilized. There are some genuinely weird things... for instance:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060555661?ie=UTF8&tag=... the paperback is half the price of the Kindle version!

I'm still not quite sure what I think about ebooks. Definitely convenient in some ways, but I like being able to hand a book I've read to my wife, or sell it used or whatever. Those things haven't quite been worked out, just yet.

Also, there's something a bit monotonous about reading everything in the same "form factor" with the same fonts.

It is absurd if I can get the same book as a paperback for less money - it is the same book, after all (essentially, digital information). Unless you are one of the rare people who has a huge advantage from just having the book electronically (like if you are traveling all the time), it just doesn't seem to make sense.

The paperback is delivered for free, too - it takes longer, but as a reader, I have some patience (it takes time to read a book, too).

If I like the paperback, I can pass it on to friends.

Carrying books around is inconvenient, but I rarely read a book twice within a short time span, so I really only take one or two books when I travel. On the other hand I don't have to worry about leaving my book on my seat on the train when I go to the toilet.

Moving and shelf space are an issue, on the other hand book shelves look good. Some people even buy fake book shelves with fake books to decorate places.

good points, but i think for me, the absurdity comes from the fact that there's no correlation between digital format and hardcopy. am i being taxed for the conversion process?

i think amazon does a decent job for most of their ebooks are much less (up to 80%) less than the hardcopies, i'm sure in some ways it's promotional to get more kindle users, but at the same time it's also a better medium for them to sell books so the volume of books sold and the savings they achieve from not having any inventory allows them to price this competitively.

plus, not to mention, a consumer must think of the total costs associated with purchasing digital content, the viewer, whether it be computer or device.

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