You'd think the publishers would be happy, but even they don't understand. This is from an essay in the New York Times “Week in Review” from Sunday, May 17th:

Publishers are caught between authors who want to be paid high advances and consumers who believe they should pay less for a digital edition, largely because the publishers save on printing and shipping costs. But publishers argue that those costs, which generally run about 12.5 percent of the average hardcover retail list price, do not entirely disappear with e-books. What’s more, the costs of writing, editing and marketing remain the same.

“The concept that because a book is an e-book it should automatically be priced significantly lower than a paper book is one we don’t agree with,” said Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “What a consumer is buying is the content, not necessarily the format.”

Sorry, Carolyn. In your model, the consumer is not buying the content. The consumer is obtaining a license to view the content on the user's own reading device. Not to lend the content to a friend, not to sell the content at a used-content sales, and certainly not to leave behind on the bus for someone else to discover and enjoy.

My guess is that libraries will survive just fine without printed books. There are too many other information retrieval functions which they provide. Lending books, while still significant, is becoming a smaller part of what a library does.

But, as you point out, what is the social cost of world in which ideas are bought and sold on the basis of a one time right to use.

You'd think the publishers would be happy, but even they don't understand. This is from an essay in the New York Times “Week in Review” from Sunday, May 17th:

Publishers are caught between authors who want to be paid high advances and consumers who believe they should pay less for a digital edition, largely because the publishers save on printing and shipping costs. But publishers argue that those costs, which generally run about 12.5 percent of the average hardcover retail list price, do not entirely disappear with e-books. What’s more, the costs of writing, editing and marketing remain the same.

“The concept that because a book is an e-book it should automatically be priced significantly lower than a paper book is one we don’t agree with,” said Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “What a consumer is buying is the content, not necessarily the format.”

Sorry, Carolyn. In your model, the consumer is not buying the content. The consumer is obtaining a license to view the content on the user's own reading device. Not to lend the content to a friend, not to sell the content at a used-content sales, and certainly not to leave behind on the bus for someone else to discover and enjoy.

My guess is that libraries will survive just fine without printed books. There are too many other information retrieval functions which they provide. Lending books, while still significant, is becoming a smaller part of what a library does.

But, as you point out, what is the social cost of world in which ideas are bought and sold on the basis of a one time right to use.