Slashdot Mirror
Murdoch Says E-Book Prices Will Kill Paper Books
hrimhari writes "The settlement between Amazon and Macmillian got the attention of a known dinosaur. Consistent to his views, Mr. Murdoch wants to defend his book editors by killing the cheaper solution. '"We don't like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99," Murdoch said. "They pay us the wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge," he said. "But I think it really devalues books, and it hurts all the retailers of the hardcover books.'"
How is this NOT price fixing? They use licensing semantics to do an end run around the idea, but in the end it's price fixing. Last I heard, anti competitive practices like that are illegal in the United States.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Publishers have a firm grasp on the real world*. What they're hoping is that you won't be bothered to go to the used bookstore to get that book. Or even when it is convenient (like Amazon Marketplace), you are too impatient to wait. So far, the sales figures seem to bear this out. Convenience wins.
In music, of course, this revolution has come and gone, but-- I don't like downloading MP3s. I buy CDs, a good chunk of those used, either online or at the place down the street. I think of this as an 'automatic backup' of sorts. My friends, particularly the ones still in their 20's, think I am insane. "But dood, yo can get itoonz in like one click!" they say. Those are the people who will probably buy an e-book. They can buy it while they're on a bus or something. Very convenient.
* In publishing, not only do the big publishers know exactly how their stuff is selling (like what is sold, what is returned, what is stolen, what enters the second-hand market...), but they buy information they don't have so they know what their competitors are doing, too (e.g., a company called Monument Information Resource sells this). But not just that... publishers also occasionally sample bookstores to get a third view of that data. And, of course, there's lots of fraternizing between companies because employees switch jobs all the time. Anyway... they know what's going on, even at the piracy end. They are very clued into this by now.
eBook: $10.00
# times you can loan: 0
# years you can own: probably 10
Resale value: $0.00
Paperback: $7.00
# times you can loan: personal best, oh, about 10
# years you can own: personal best, 34
Resale value: personal best, $27.00
Yeh, I can see how eBooks are undercutting paperbacks.
Hardcovers? Who buys hardcovers?
I don't know if you want to keep putting that out there. Because a little further down you get to:
Men, on average, knew more than women, all other factors being equal
And it's apparently dramatically more than women. 45% vs. 25% "knowledge level high." That's inconvenient.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And yet, those who watched the O'Reilly Factor were broadly comparable (51% vs 54% max of any show) in percent of viewers who scored "high", and did better than NPR listeners (mid vs low categories). The show with the greatest percentage of "low" scorers was... the Jim Lehrer NewsHour. The lowest scorer among "high knowledge" was... network news. In fact, O'Reilly's viewers had the smallest percentage with a "low" knowledge of any source whatsoever.
In other words, news junkies are better informed about various political hot topics (because that's what the survey measured) than people who don't give a damn, and the show that they watch is pretty much irrelevant. If you don't like Fox's opinionists, watch CNN. And vice versa. Odds are, you'll be just as well informed.
"Capitalism" as we know it was an industrial philosophy. It was devised in a time where value came from physical objects, because physical production was expensive. This was a time where a physical object had one purpose and one purpose only, and its value came from how well it fulfilled that purpose.
But look at the computer sitting in front of you. Chances are, you've spent more money on software than on the PC itself. The true value of a computing device comes from its configuration, because physically it is a general purpose device with the potential to do anything but the ability to do nothing. Software adds value to it.
No, this doesn't make sense in an industrialist-capitalist context. Something non-physical with value?
But consider AutoCAD, which costs three or four times the price of the PC it runs on. It took millions of man hours to create, and save millions of man hours every year for its users. If it sold at it's physical "value" it would be free. If it was free, Autodesk would go out of business and wouldn't write any more software. No materials or environments updates means no more AutoCAD. Which means people go back to pen and paper. Value is lost for everyone.
But going back to eBooks, there is still competition. Amazon UK has 451 books on "Ruby on Rails", for example. Copyright protection keeps prices high enough that a new entrant can afford to launch a book, while the reality of competition means that people are undercutting each other as much as they can afford to in order to get the needed market share. The market has reached equilibrium, and these books add genuine value by costing the same as about 3 man-hours of programming time, but being the product of thousands of man-hours for authors, proofreaders, typesetters etc and saving the buyer lots of time. Value is created, and the creators of that value must be rewarded.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'