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Originally posted by RacerX2oo3
there is no reason why e-books should cost as much as a hardcover, greedy publishers will drive buyers away from the e-book market
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well, ebooks have advantages over material books as well. you can read an ebook in perfect darkness because of the device's backlight. you also don't have to hold the pages down to keep them from turning or even just to keep the book open. and ebooks are infinitely portable.
ebooks are complimentary goods. unless a person has a PPC or is particularly keen on doing absolutely everything sitting at his desktop computer, that person won't have any interest in an ebook, so the market is drastically limited already.
If the person has got a PPC or other handheld, then ebooks increase the value of the ppc as well as provide their own intrinsic value. I am willing to bet that many of us don't buy an ebook simply because we want to read that book--we also buy the ebook because we want to read it
on our PPCs.
of course there are major drawbacks as you said, including the fact that MS reader books for example can only be read on the purchaser's device(s). so the question when trying to figure out how an ebook should be priced relative to a material book is whether or not the advantages outweigh the disadvantages in the consumer's valuation of the ebook. if they are equal, then the consumer values the ebook at the same price as the consumer values the material book, and the price should be the same.
this gets really subjective, but my point is that there are features of ebooks that make them
more valuable than material books in certain respects, and these advantages offset the drawbacks with a buoyancy in price. how much that effect should be is again subjective and certain to be downplayed significantly in a forum perused mainly by consumers such as aximsite.
as PPC prices continue to fall, more people will buy handhelds because suddenly they can afford them. once these people start showing up in force in the ebook market, it will be worth it for ebook sellers' to lower their prices because all of a sudden the middle-income people are so much more numerous than the upper-income people. Presumably these upper-income people substantially dominate the current ebook market, as it would help explain the high price level.
Good God I sound like one of my classes...I hope I'm not traumatizing anyone...the sad thing is that everything I'm basing my lecturing on can be learned in about an hour in the event that the person hasn't already intuited all of it on their own.... econ is such a worthless major.....kind of like my foreign affairs [double]major.....hmmm......