i've had an ongoing "argument" with rip about e-books vs traditional books. and every time we can't agree because i feel like he isn't qualified to. in the last 10 years he, on average, has read less than two books a year. i more than double his annual reading rate in a month.
i hope paperback books keep coming out for a long long long time. i don't like hardcovers since they're less convenient: they're heavy, don't fit in my purse, are hard to hold with one hand, and because they're generally much more expensive, i'm more careful with them. which is annoying. but i also feel like books in general are too expensive.
most of my friends who are big readers have some sort of e-book reader. but none of us use it as our primary reader because traditional books are just a million times better! add price on top of all that, and not one of us is willing to permanently make the switch. but i do know that if e-books were significantly cheaper than print books, we could definitely be swayed.
i remember in high school cds were like $17 each. then napster and itunes became popular, now most cds are less than $13. book publishers really need to learn from the music industry! cds were priced to match mp3 prices, and books should be priced to be comparable to e-book prices, not the other way around as it is currently. i recently read somewhere else that used bookstores are doing really good business, and it's because people won't (maybe can't?) afford to spend $16 on a paperback or $26 on a hardback when they can get it for half off.
3 comments:
they better not get rid of paperbacks and print books!! oy!
Of course I don't read books so my opinions are limited. The last time we talked about this all I was doing was proposing a suggestion for a future technology for something that may make people like ebook readers more (by making ebook reading similar to reading a physical book)
Costwise, of course, cheaper is better for the consumer especially since ebooks are cheaper to produce/distribute etc. The argument was that they'll cannibalize their sales of regular books if they cut the price on ebooks. I don't have to read a lot of books to know that this makes sense.
You said above that after itunes/napster became popular that CDs dropped in price. If book publishers "LEARN" from that, then they should NOT drop ebook prices because they will lose value on the books they're publishing! Book publishers dont make money off of USED books either. The same problem exists in the used video games market, publishers dont get a cut of the reselling. So to make their money they price games higher. (Games were 40, then 50, now 60)
your suggestion was having an ebook reader with actual turnable pages that digitally displays text. but as an avid bookreader, i don't care about physically turning the pages. that's not even vaguely why i don't prefer my kindle.
"If book publishers "LEARN" from that, then they should NOT drop ebook prices because they will lose value on the books they're publishing!" so you're suggesting that book publishers raise the prices on paper books so by comparison ebooks will be cheaper?
at the end of the day, publishes just want to make money. and since it costs them less to "make" ebooks, they should try to sell more of those. and to do that, they should lower the price of ebooks because many of us would be willing to sacrifice the pleasure of reading paper books for the convenience and price of ebooks.
raising the prices of paper books will only help libraries and used book stores since a lot of us already don't buy new books, e or not, because of their price.
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