What I find funny is that this would have never happened if they charged the standard $9.99 e-book price (which in itself is absolutely too much for e-books).
The $5 difference is causing quite a stir which I am sure is not worth it in the long run.
The $5 difference is causing quite a stir which I am sure is not worth it in the long run.
Valuing a book by it's physical properties is a practice that's gone on for far too long. Lots of technical books are full of "padding" and duplication because no-one will buy a 50 page book which concisely provides the useful information for $10-$20. It waste a huge amount of time both of the author and the readers.
1. Modern Algebra by John R. Durbin
2. Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser
3. Machine Learning - An Algorithmic Perspective by Stephen Marsland (not quite on the same level as the above two, but still pretty solid)
I think Tanenbaum's Operating System and Appel's Compilers books both go in this category too, they're big but not compared to their subject matter. But, I've seen enough people disappointed in both to think this is more my personal opinion at play.
I think if we are talking about entertainment books (novels and such), there simply is too much competition. At the end of the day, a lot of those entertainment books could be exchanged for another entertainment book. I suppose for similar reasons cinema tickets tend to not vary too much with the content of the movie?
A few years ago Stelios of EasyJet fame tried to start a cinema chain which offered dynamic pricing, Warner Bros, Disney, and 20th Century Fox all refused to licence any of their movies to him which more or less killed his business.
Until you find those authors you adore to that degree, however, yes books are totally interchangeable after a certain quality threshold is passed.
On the flip side, the convenience of ebooks helps to defray some of these obvious cons.
It doesn't when an ebook is priced higher than paper editions with the same content. I do agree on the padding, though.
If you don't believe this, absent a conspiracy theory about publishing†, you don't believe in markets.
† For instance, that it's impossible to publish without a publisher, which seems objectively false in 2011.
If the parent poster is correct then we'll see a price correction towards a lower price. We'll also see a more active black market appear as has happened in the world of music if the price doesn't drop.
The 9.99 price is likely low enough to discourage most market participants from piracy but if it goes much higher then who knows. To suggest that the state of the market as we see it now is the optimal one isn't correct since the free market should always be fluctuating as things change in the world.
That said if the price was really too high then no one would buy ebooks and everyone would have fixed that by now or decided to abandon the idea for the time being.
If your logic held, every paper book would cost the same amount; _The Very Hungry Caterpiller_ would cost within pennies of the same amount as Volume 1 of _The Art Of Computer Programming_. After all, you're not paying for the paper. Judging from the amount of junk mail in my mailbox every morning, paper is pretty cheap.
Clearly it is also the case that _The Art Of Computer Programming_ as an ebook has exactly the same scarcity as _Twilight: New Moon_'s ebook; according to your logic, they must also cost the same.
If you're a parent you know that the Very Hungry Caterpiller uses different paper and different production techniques (holes in the pages, thicker paper) which while raising the cost is offset by the demand for it being much greater than TAOCP. TAOCP costs more due to a smaller demand and the fact that substitutes don't really exist. VHC has tons of substitutes.
I mean to say that ebooks' lack of scarcity seems to trigger consumer expectations about pricing and what they are willing to pay. This has implications for the demand curve. I wouldn't suggest that the ebooks should all cost the same but that their cost to produce additional units is zero. If a paperback book experiences a massive spike in demand that's protracted and extreme the costs of books to consumers would rise or a shortage would develop. There is no chance of an ebook shortage apart from amazon.com going down.