No, the DOJ action is not about ebooks costing more than paper books, or even that the cost of ebooks is 'too high'. The DOJ action is about Apple conspiring with the publishers to ensure that Apple does not have to compete with anyone on price. That is illegal.
Anyone is free to set whatever price they want on the goods they are selling (except in certain situations, like necessities during an emergency). The market will decide if the price is too high or not.
You're kidding, right? That is pretty much the basis of the whole case. Apple got the publishers to move from the 'wholesale' (ie Walmart) model to the 'agency' model. Under the wholesale model, the retailer purchases the book from the publisher for some price, and sells it to the customer for whatever price he wants. Under the agency model, the publisher sets the final selling price, and gives the retailer a cut of the money. Under the agency model there is no wholesale, the retailer has no choice as to the final cost to the customer.
Then, having successfully convinced the publishers to exclusively use the agency model, they also got the publishers to agree that no competitor would get a retail price cheaper than Apple's. That is not 'getting the best deal', that is price fixing.
This is an oft-repeated meme on slashdot, and for the most part it is just plain wrong.
The only time that statement is true is when there are multiple sources of a product, and there is no difference between the products (or the purchasing thereof) except for price. For instance, supposing there are two sellers of product X, selling the exact same item. Retailer A charges $2 and has the product available today. Retailer B only charges $1, but you have to wait a month to get the product. Those two purchases are NOT identical, and the fact that retailer B is charging only half of what retailer A is charging is not going to cause A to lower his price.
Now, for the comparison between paper books and e-books. The first, most obvious, thing is that ebooks and paper books are not the same thing. Therefore, comparing their prices is meaningless. Sure, they both have the same content. But beyond that there are value adders and detractors. Is paper an adder or detractor? Depends on the purchaser. Some people would pay more to have a physical book. Some people would pay more to NOT have a physical book they have to carry around, store, and dispose of.
If people are willing to pay more for an ebook (ie the ebooks are selling), why is the market not 'working as it should'? If people are not willing to pay more for an ebook (the ebooks are not selling), why is the market not 'working as it should'? The market works both ways - sometimes prices go up, sometimes they go down.
That is not the same thing at all. Walmart uses their size to pressure suppliers into selling their goods TO WALMART at a better price than they sell to Walmart's competitors. However, just because Target pays a higher price for a HDTV than Walmart does does not mean that Target must sell the TV for a higher price. Target can set it's own selling price, maybe selling for more, maybe taking less profit and selling at the same price, maybe taking a loss on the sale to get people into the store.
This case, however, is about Apple setting the minimum price that it's competitors can SELL an ebook for, not the price that the competitors PAY for the ebook.
You couldn't be more wrong, as is apparent from the fact that prices went up, not down.
This was not a case of Apple coming in and saying 'Amazon is selling books for $10 - that is too much. We want a better price than that.' This WAS a case of Apple saying 'Amazon is selling books for $10 - that is too little. We want to sell them for $20. BTW - make sure Amazon can no longer sell them for $10.'
Because mismatches between what you report and what they already know give a good indication that the stuff you reported that they don't know about may be less than accurate/truthful.
No-one said that the math was the hard part. Everyone has said (and you have not refuted in any effective way) that the hard part is understanding the tax code (including all the latest updates) and correctly implementing that as code.
So what is this great open-source tax software that has been 'vetted' by professional tax experts? Why don't you provide a link to it? Also, I assume that since this unnamed software has been written and vetted by 'professionals' that those developers will stand behind their work like the commercial companies do, and they will pay any penalties incurred as a result of their mistakes.
I disagree that the idea of teaching typing and calculator use was because the technology was earthshaking. They were taught (usually as part of a 'business' curriculum) because with those skills you could actually get a useful job (typist or bookkeeper) right out of high school. Same with keypunching. The Apples are where the wheels started falling off. Using an Apple II was not a useful skill, no business was using them. That was the point where an attempt was made to use the computer as an educational tool in itself, often with bad results.
The part that you left out: "with no intention to litigate". In other words, if you just want the court to order the ISP to hand over a list of names so you can shake them down, forget it. If however, you actually intend to SUE the people who don't settle, then the court will get involved.
Another point: if it was 'standard' to use SI for years and years, why was Lockheed not using SI? Surely this was not Lockheed's first foray into the aerospace industry. If it was 'standard', why did no-one inside Lockheed raise a red flag and say 'wtf'? Is every Lockheed manager and employee a moron who doesn't know the 'standard'? Or maybe, just maybe, there were communication failures. Maybe using SI is not quite the 'standard' when dealing with actual hardware that people assume it is - communications problem. Maybe people in Lockheed did think WTF, but did not bother or were afraid to say anything - communications/leadership problem. Maybe people DID say something, but they were ignored - communications/leadership problem.
Well, you did miss the point. It was ENTIRELY a communications problem. Saying 'NASA specified SI' does not mean there was effective communication. That's like saying just because a teacher gave a lecture all the students have learned the information. How do you know the information was received and understood? How do you know that information was received and understood by every single person working on the project?
It is obvious that somewhere along the line there was a breakdown in communication. It could have been between NASA and the supplier, it could have been internal to the supplier, but somewhere communication failed, and that failure is what lead directly to the disaster. And the poorest excuse for bad communication is 'you should have known'.
Note that this failure could have just as easily occurred even if SI was being used. What if one party thought they were getting a rate specified in cm/sec, but the other party thought it was supposed to be in mm/sec? All SI units, just as spectacular a failure. Didn't an Arianne rocket blow up because of something very similar to this?
You should read the article, because your comment is exactly the kind of thing he is talking about. Technical people who think they have found a technical problem, therefore the solution is to correct that problem. If the problem was really that measurement system the US uses is 'wrong', then how can the US have so many successful space missions? The problem is not that there are multiple measurement systems, or that one is somehow superior to the other. The problem is that the teams did not communicate successfully - not a technical problem at all. And don't say 'well, if the stupid US would use the same system as the rest of the world it wouldn't be a problem', because that just shows you completely missed the point. The point is that there was ineffective communication - a leadership problem - not simply a technical problem.
According to TFA, they did do the final test, and it showed problems. Unfortunately, they came to the conclusion that the test was bad, not the mirror. They assumed that since the mirror was no longer on it's 'bed of nails', it was sagging under gravity, and that was causing the test error.
When was the last time you heard of a bank, credit card company, airline reservation system, etc losing data because of bad backups? Never? All of that stuff is backed up on tape. Tape backup systems have been making multiple copies of tapes, and periodically testing the tapes, and getting them offsite (in very cheap storage) for at least 4 decades.
From my experience, the number of disks that would not spin up after sitting unused for a long period far outnumbers the number of tapes that were unreadable after the same period of time. Which means you need to keep the disks spinning, which is doing nothing but wasting power.
Of course, disk backup certainly also has it's uses, primarily as disaster recovery like you said. But store 10 years of credit card transaction logs (which will seldom, if ever, be looked at) on spinning disk? You'd be insane to think that would be cheaper or better than tape.
I use a system that does backups first to DASD, then to tape. Restoring a file from tape takes maybe 5-10 minutes, including the time waiting for the robot to mount the volume. Hardly a 'very long time'.
The cost of production figures into the minimum price the seller is willing to sell it for. The maximum price is what the market will bear. If you don't think the value you get from a product is worth the price asked, don't buy it. If people think the price is too high, they don't buy it. If the seller thinks the price is too low, he doesn't sell it. Neither party is in any way obligated to buy or sell against their wishes.
How very insightful that 'the current IP rights system encourages monopoly behavior'. I mean, it's not like it says right in the Constitution "... Authors and Inventors have Exclusive Rights to their Respective Writings and Discoveries". Of course it's a monopoly, it is SUPPOSED to be.
Judging by the number of people on here who say real books are much more valuable then ebooks because 'I can give it away/sell it when I am done reading it' there must be millions of copies of these books available cheap or free or at the library. There is your competition.
I didn't say 'unit cost', I said 'cost'. That is all cost, fixed and unit.
Except for 'money is no object' types of things (of which there are none in mass-market consumer goods) you ALWAYS start with a budget. If you don't have a budget costs will spiral out of control and you will either have a product no-one can afford, or you will go out of business before even getting your product to market. To determine your budget, you need to know what your expected income is. To know what your expected income is you need to know your expected sales volume and the price you are selling at. Which brings us back to: price comes first.
You arrive at that price point with market research, etc. If there are existing similar products then the price point has pretty much been set already. If there are no similar products, you make your best attempt at guessing what the market will bear. Many times this works, sometimes it results in spectacular failure. There is no point in designing a new tablet that has a $2000 BOM cost, because nobody will buy it. The price point for tablets has already been set in the $500-600 range. People are not going to be willing to pay more than that just because your BOM cost is so high.
This, of course, also applies outside of the consumer mass-market. For instance, if you want a house built the FIRST thing you are going to be asked is how much you want to spend (the price point). Everything else is based on that.
To me, "what the market will bear" is exactly the same as the consensus of value.
You obviously don't value ebooks the same as the consensus value. That is your prerogative, but it does not mean that the consensus is wrong.
You say that if the price were lower they would sell more and the profit would be higher. But is that realistic? If they dropped the price from $8 to $7, would that entice you to buy the ebook? They would need to increase sales almost 15% just to make the SAME money. But I suspect most of the people complaining about the price in relation to the cost would still complain just as much if the price were only $7. So how low do they have to make the price to get all of these 'price should reflect cost' people to buy? Drop the price to $1? They would have to then sell 8 times as many books to make the SAME money. It is just not realistic in any way.
You say you don't care what the publishing costs are, then go on to say how low the costs are, etc. So obviously you DO care what the costs are.
The prices are what they are because enough people are willing to pay that price, exactly like every other non-essential consumer good. Couldn't get any simpler than that.
The same way other such disputes are resolved. The court orders the property to be auctioned off, and each party gets it's respective share of the proceeds.
Did you even read the article you linked? Nowhere in there does it say that the salvaged property becomes the property of the salvor. What it does say is that the salvor can go to court with a claim, and may be entitled to an award, rarely exceeding 50% of the value of the item.
What is contradictory? A minimum sentence of two years, and a maximum sentence of at least two years is not contradictory. A minimum of two years and a maximum of at least one year would be contradictory.
The problem with that formula is that it is backwards. For consumer goods, you start with a price point and work backwards from there. Start with the price, subtract your expected profit, and that determines the maximum cost you can afford. If you can lower your cost, profit goes up. If your product doesn't sell, you lower the price and profit goes down. If the sales exceed expectations you can raise the price and profit goes up. You never start with a cost, add some profit figure, and set the price according to that. This is of course from a producers point of view. Retailers do use the cost+profit method, but the cost portion has already been determined by the producer using the above method.
Why should they be cheaper? They COULD be cheaper, but why SHOULD they? There is a perfectly logical reason that the ebooks cost 2 dollars more than the print books - people are willing to pay it!
Once again, cost to manufacture does not equal value. Price is set by value. Let's assume that the value of the content is the same for the ebook and the paper book. Now, what additional value do you get by having the paper book? For some people, there is some value in that. For many people, there is no value in having the paper. What value do you get from NOT having a paper book? What value do you get from being able to carry your entire collection with you? What value do you get from being able to decide to buy a book at 3AM Sunday morning and start reading it seconds later?
Since the ebooks that are priced higher than the paper books do sell (or else they would lower the price), it appears that many (most?) people value the benefits of an ebook more than the value a paper book.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the DOJ action is not about ebooks costing more than paper books, or even that the cost of ebooks is 'too high'. The DOJ action is about Apple conspiring with the publishers to ensure that Apple does not have to compete with anyone on price. That is illegal.
Anyone is free to set whatever price they want on the goods they are selling (except in certain situations, like necessities during an emergency). The market will decide if the price is too high or not.
You're kidding, right? That is pretty much the basis of the whole case. Apple got the publishers to move from the 'wholesale' (ie Walmart) model to the 'agency' model. Under the wholesale model, the retailer purchases the book from the publisher for some price, and sells it to the customer for whatever price he wants. Under the agency model, the publisher sets the final selling price, and gives the retailer a cut of the money. Under the agency model there is no wholesale, the retailer has no choice as to the final cost to the customer.
Then, having successfully convinced the publishers to exclusively use the agency model, they also got the publishers to agree that no competitor would get a retail price cheaper than Apple's. That is not 'getting the best deal', that is price fixing.
This is an oft-repeated meme on slashdot, and for the most part it is just plain wrong.
The only time that statement is true is when there are multiple sources of a product, and there is no difference between the products (or the purchasing thereof) except for price. For instance, supposing there are two sellers of product X, selling the exact same item. Retailer A charges $2 and has the product available today. Retailer B only charges $1, but you have to wait a month to get the product. Those two purchases are NOT identical, and the fact that retailer B is charging only half of what retailer A is charging is not going to cause A to lower his price.
Now, for the comparison between paper books and e-books. The first, most obvious, thing is that ebooks and paper books are not the same thing. Therefore, comparing their prices is meaningless. Sure, they both have the same content. But beyond that there are value adders and detractors. Is paper an adder or detractor? Depends on the purchaser. Some people would pay more to have a physical book. Some people would pay more to NOT have a physical book they have to carry around, store, and dispose of.
If people are willing to pay more for an ebook (ie the ebooks are selling), why is the market not 'working as it should'? If people are not willing to pay more for an ebook (the ebooks are not selling), why is the market not 'working as it should'? The market works both ways - sometimes prices go up, sometimes they go down.
That is not the same thing at all. Walmart uses their size to pressure suppliers into selling their goods TO WALMART at a better price than they sell to Walmart's competitors. However, just because Target pays a higher price for a HDTV than Walmart does does not mean that Target must sell the TV for a higher price. Target can set it's own selling price, maybe selling for more, maybe taking less profit and selling at the same price, maybe taking a loss on the sale to get people into the store.
This case, however, is about Apple setting the minimum price that it's competitors can SELL an ebook for, not the price that the competitors PAY for the ebook.
You couldn't be more wrong, as is apparent from the fact that prices went up, not down.
This was not a case of Apple coming in and saying 'Amazon is selling books for $10 - that is too much. We want a better price than that.' This WAS a case of Apple saying 'Amazon is selling books for $10 - that is too little. We want to sell them for $20. BTW - make sure Amazon can no longer sell them for $10.'
Because mismatches between what you report and what they already know give a good indication that the stuff you reported that they don't know about may be less than accurate/truthful.
No-one said that the math was the hard part. Everyone has said (and you have not refuted in any effective way) that the hard part is understanding the tax code (including all the latest updates) and correctly implementing that as code.
So what is this great open-source tax software that has been 'vetted' by professional tax experts? Why don't you provide a link to it? Also, I assume that since this unnamed software has been written and vetted by 'professionals' that those developers will stand behind their work like the commercial companies do, and they will pay any penalties incurred as a result of their mistakes.
They are booth-like structures which FORMERLY housed telephones. Now they are being reused as information kiosks.
I disagree that the idea of teaching typing and calculator use was because the technology was earthshaking. They were taught (usually as part of a 'business' curriculum) because with those skills you could actually get a useful job (typist or bookkeeper) right out of high school. Same with keypunching. The Apples are where the wheels started falling off. Using an Apple II was not a useful skill, no business was using them. That was the point where an attempt was made to use the computer as an educational tool in itself, often with bad results.
The part that you left out: "with no intention to litigate". In other words, if you just want the court to order the ISP to hand over a list of names so you can shake them down, forget it. If however, you actually intend to SUE the people who don't settle, then the court will get involved.
Another point: if it was 'standard' to use SI for years and years, why was Lockheed not using SI? Surely this was not Lockheed's first foray into the aerospace industry. If it was 'standard', why did no-one inside Lockheed raise a red flag and say 'wtf'? Is every Lockheed manager and employee a moron who doesn't know the 'standard'? Or maybe, just maybe, there were communication failures. Maybe using SI is not quite the 'standard' when dealing with actual hardware that people assume it is - communications problem. Maybe people in Lockheed did think WTF, but did not bother or were afraid to say anything - communications/leadership problem. Maybe people DID say something, but they were ignored - communications/leadership problem.
Well, you did miss the point. It was ENTIRELY a communications problem. Saying 'NASA specified SI' does not mean there was effective communication. That's like saying just because a teacher gave a lecture all the students have learned the information. How do you know the information was received and understood? How do you know that information was received and understood by every single person working on the project?
It is obvious that somewhere along the line there was a breakdown in communication. It could have been between NASA and the supplier, it could have been internal to the supplier, but somewhere communication failed, and that failure is what lead directly to the disaster. And the poorest excuse for bad communication is 'you should have known'.
Note that this failure could have just as easily occurred even if SI was being used. What if one party thought they were getting a rate specified in cm/sec, but the other party thought it was supposed to be in mm/sec? All SI units, just as spectacular a failure. Didn't an Arianne rocket blow up because of something very similar to this?
You should read the article, because your comment is exactly the kind of thing he is talking about. Technical people who think they have found a technical problem, therefore the solution is to correct that problem. If the problem was really that measurement system the US uses is 'wrong', then how can the US have so many successful space missions? The problem is not that there are multiple measurement systems, or that one is somehow superior to the other. The problem is that the teams did not communicate successfully - not a technical problem at all. And don't say 'well, if the stupid US would use the same system as the rest of the world it wouldn't be a problem', because that just shows you completely missed the point. The point is that there was ineffective communication - a leadership problem - not simply a technical problem.
According to TFA, they did do the final test, and it showed problems. Unfortunately, they came to the conclusion that the test was bad, not the mirror. They assumed that since the mirror was no longer on it's 'bed of nails', it was sagging under gravity, and that was causing the test error.
When was the last time you heard of a bank, credit card company, airline reservation system, etc losing data because of bad backups? Never? All of that stuff is backed up on tape. Tape backup systems have been making multiple copies of tapes, and periodically testing the tapes, and getting them offsite (in very cheap storage) for at least 4 decades.
From my experience, the number of disks that would not spin up after sitting unused for a long period far outnumbers the number of tapes that were unreadable after the same period of time. Which means you need to keep the disks spinning, which is doing nothing but wasting power.
Of course, disk backup certainly also has it's uses, primarily as disaster recovery like you said. But store 10 years of credit card transaction logs (which will seldom, if ever, be looked at) on spinning disk? You'd be insane to think that would be cheaper or better than tape.
I use a system that does backups first to DASD, then to tape. Restoring a file from tape takes maybe 5-10 minutes, including the time waiting for the robot to mount the volume. Hardly a 'very long time'.
The cost of production figures into the minimum price the seller is willing to sell it for. The maximum price is what the market will bear. If you don't think the value you get from a product is worth the price asked, don't buy it. If people think the price is too high, they don't buy it. If the seller thinks the price is too low, he doesn't sell it. Neither party is in any way obligated to buy or sell against their wishes.
How very insightful that 'the current IP rights system encourages monopoly behavior'. I mean, it's not like it says right in the Constitution "... Authors and Inventors have Exclusive Rights to their Respective Writings and Discoveries". Of course it's a monopoly, it is SUPPOSED to be.
Judging by the number of people on here who say real books are much more valuable then ebooks because 'I can give it away/sell it when I am done reading it' there must be millions of copies of these books available cheap or free or at the library. There is your competition.
I didn't say 'unit cost', I said 'cost'. That is all cost, fixed and unit.
Except for 'money is no object' types of things (of which there are none in mass-market consumer goods) you ALWAYS start with a budget. If you don't have a budget costs will spiral out of control and you will either have a product no-one can afford, or you will go out of business before even getting your product to market. To determine your budget, you need to know what your expected income is. To know what your expected income is you need to know your expected sales volume and the price you are selling at. Which brings us back to: price comes first.
You arrive at that price point with market research, etc. If there are existing similar products then the price point has pretty much been set already. If there are no similar products, you make your best attempt at guessing what the market will bear. Many times this works, sometimes it results in spectacular failure. There is no point in designing a new tablet that has a $2000 BOM cost, because nobody will buy it. The price point for tablets has already been set in the $500-600 range. People are not going to be willing to pay more than that just because your BOM cost is so high.
This, of course, also applies outside of the consumer mass-market. For instance, if you want a house built the FIRST thing you are going to be asked is how much you want to spend (the price point). Everything else is based on that.
To me, "what the market will bear" is exactly the same as the consensus of value.
You obviously don't value ebooks the same as the consensus value. That is your prerogative, but it does not mean that the consensus is wrong.
You say that if the price were lower they would sell more and the profit would be higher. But is that realistic? If they dropped the price from $8 to $7, would that entice you to buy the ebook? They would need to increase sales almost 15% just to make the SAME money. But I suspect most of the people complaining about the price in relation to the cost would still complain just as much if the price were only $7. So how low do they have to make the price to get all of these 'price should reflect cost' people to buy? Drop the price to $1? They would have to then sell 8 times as many books to make the SAME money. It is just not realistic in any way.
You say you don't care what the publishing costs are, then go on to say how low the costs are, etc. So obviously you DO care what the costs are.
The prices are what they are because enough people are willing to pay that price, exactly like every other non-essential consumer good. Couldn't get any simpler than that.
The same way other such disputes are resolved. The court orders the property to be auctioned off, and each party gets it's respective share of the proceeds.
Did you even read the article you linked? Nowhere in there does it say that the salvaged property becomes the property of the salvor. What it does say is that the salvor can go to court with a claim, and may be entitled to an award, rarely exceeding 50% of the value of the item.
What is contradictory? A minimum sentence of two years, and a maximum sentence of at least two years is not contradictory. A minimum of two years and a maximum of at least one year would be contradictory.
The problem with that formula is that it is backwards. For consumer goods, you start with a price point and work backwards from there. Start with the price, subtract your expected profit, and that determines the maximum cost you can afford. If you can lower your cost, profit goes up. If your product doesn't sell, you lower the price and profit goes down. If the sales exceed expectations you can raise the price and profit goes up. You never start with a cost, add some profit figure, and set the price according to that. This is of course from a producers point of view. Retailers do use the cost+profit method, but the cost portion has already been determined by the producer using the above method.
Why should they be cheaper? They COULD be cheaper, but why SHOULD they? There is a perfectly logical reason that the ebooks cost 2 dollars more than the print books - people are willing to pay it!
Once again, cost to manufacture does not equal value. Price is set by value. Let's assume that the value of the content is the same for the ebook and the paper book. Now, what additional value do you get by having the paper book? For some people, there is some value in that. For many people, there is no value in having the paper. What value do you get from NOT having a paper book? What value do you get from being able to carry your entire collection with you? What value do you get from being able to decide to buy a book at 3AM Sunday morning and start reading it seconds later?
Since the ebooks that are priced higher than the paper books do sell (or else they would lower the price), it appears that many (most?) people value the benefits of an ebook more than the value a paper book.