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Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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