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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I would not ever pay $100 on an ebook.

If a hardcover book costs $100, it is most likely some high-quality scientific book that was never printed in great volume. I would pay that price because there was no alternative and MANY people recommended it to me.

For ebooks however, there is no such thing as low-volume hardcover prints. Unless you write the very best book on this whole planet, I would not be able to justify shelling out $100 for an ebook.

$100 is the price you pay for Microsoft Office or Microsoft Windows, because there is no alternative and it took hundreds of people several years to build it. $100 is the price you pay for two brand-new blockbuster video games that both took hundreds of people dozens of months to make. $100 is not the price to pay for what one writer has done in a year or so. At least not to me, I'm sorry.

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How about if it was an ebook that had information on how a business can save $3000 a year in a certain area. Is that ebook okay to be priced at $2000?

Books shouldn't just be valued based on how much they cost to produce, but of the value of information inside and how much that information is worth to the target audience.

I'm glad books aren't priced like that - I would not be able to afford half the books I read :(

I think there's also a lot to be said in regards to how much value a reader has, too. As in, if there are more readers, will it make me, the author, more "rich" in other ways too (popularity, Twitter followers, etc.) so that when the next ebook comes along I already have thousands of people interested in buying my book that didn't exist before. A low price tag increases readers, which I think have huge individual values in themselves.

Now, if the book is extremely niche ... almost ridiculously so ... then a $3000 book probably would be okay, but in general I think this isn't going to happen too often.

The comparison to Windows or blockbuster video games seems bogus to me. Windows sells several million copies. A blockbuster game sells hundreds of thousands to millions of copies. A typical book sells several orders of magnitude less than that.

Windows sells several million copies.

Try 150 million as of 2010: http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/W...

I would pay that price because there was no alternative and MANY people recommended it to me.

But those same conditions would apply to an e-book version.

Do you suspect that the publisher is making an "unfair" profit?

Suppose I write a book that takes considerable effort but has an audience of maybe hundred people in the world, but those hundred would derive real value from it.

Pricing it at $30.00 would be economic suicide. To make it worth my time and effort I may have to charge $100 or $500. Or more.

I tend to bristle at the some of the prices of purely digital goods, but one way to look at it is in terms of value obtained by the reader, not value (or cost) expended by the author.

The argument that something deserves a high prices because of how much time and effort went into it is the same fallacy that leads people to say "hard work should be rewarded." Lots of things are hard to do but have no real value, and value should drive reward.

This is not about fairness. The author can price his book any way he wants for all I care. But I won't buy it.

"But I won't buy it."

I got that. I'm trying to understand why.

It seems to be that, past a certain price, value for money requires a physical object.

> hundreds of people several years to build it.

Thousands of people several decades, maybe.

I would also never pay $100 for an eBook. Regardless of content, I expect a hardcover for that price.

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