If you restrict the facts to those explicitly mentioned above, maybe that makes sense. Unfortunately, Apple already has rules in place that specify that any eBook sold through their store CANNOT be sold for less at a competing store. Amazon can't charge more if they have to go through the iBooks store - this is an established, already extant policy. And since they can't charge more, the Apple 30% essentially has to come out of their own share. This is especially a problem from Amazon's point of view because this is a surcharge for a set of services that they not only provide on their own, and can't stop providing, but that they provide superior versions of on their own.
This isn't something that Apple could miss - this is the whole POINT of Apple's revision of the rules. They're trying to drive Amazon off the Kindle, to reduce competition for their own eBook store.
The other disadvantage is that Apple is declaring that use of the web browser on their device is covered by their sales regulation - which is problematic for various reasons.
Finally, you want them to "keep" the cost of the devices down? Really? Neither the iPhone nor the iPad are subsidized devices, and they're both sold at a substantial profit on the hardware. Apple doesn't have a history of dropping costs due to new revenue streams - it's counter their model of selling their goods as luxury or premium items.
He's flaming, you're inaccurate, let's call the whole thing a wash.
Apple's neither the magical cheapness fairy who saved music, nor some sort of cartoon supervillain who's going to use iPads to take over the universe. What they are is a managed-hardware company with minor arms in software and PC sales. Unfortunately in many respects, they have an institutional habit of trying to use their hardware management to extend vendor lock-in, at the expense of business competition and personal freedom on those devices. In this case, they're trying to prevent superior eBook services from competing on their devices, at least without Apple getting an unearned cut of the proceedings.
TL;DR Version: Just because they made beneficial decisions in the music business (for selfish reasons, and mostly over ten years ago) doesn't mean that they aren't being anti-competitive right now.
Who's the middleman, who's the source, and where are people saving money? This doesn't match up with the article, the summary, or the parent.
Apple sold a device. They are intermediaries for programs that can be run on the device. They also run a (second-rate) eBook store, with delivery to the device.
Amazon also runs an eBook store, with delivery to the device. Due to Apple's restrictions on what you can and can't do with the device, they run the actual "store" part of their eBook store from a website over a browser.
Apple is now trying to force them to run their eBook store through Apple's, in order to take commission on Amazon's sales on the device.
Both of the players are middlemen, in the sense that they are retailers. Amazon getting squeezed out doesn't save anyone money; all it does is make Amazon's books unavailable on the device.
It's an affluent market, and certainly a large portion of the market for Smartphones/Tablets, but I question how big section of Amazon's and/or B&N's market it is. I know Kindle books are more popular on iPad than Apple's, but Apple's is a non-entity in sales terms, if I recall correctly; and part of the wonder of Amazon's multi-device model is that, while people stop being able to read the books on their iPad/Phone, they don't actually stop being able to read them, period.
I imagine a lot of the people who have significant money invested in Kindle book collections will curse briefly, and then pick up a Kindle/Nook/NookColor/AndroidPhone.
If you can afford an iPad, you can probably afford to pick up another device if your iPad stops doing what you want. And past a certain number of already purchased Kindle books, that could even be a reasonable economic decision, at least if piracy is off the table.
I imagine Amazon could negotiate a less than 30% cut for in-app purchases.
Why do you imagine this? Apple is (in)famous for using its ownership of hardware to shut out competitors; for example, any number of music stores with more content back in the early iTunes days. If Amazon flounces, well, it would be a setback for the iPad users, but most of them are already bought into the device for $500+; they're unlikely to drop the device entirely, and any software they buy through it goes through Apple.
It's at least as likely that Apple will either find partners willing to play by their rules, or, if all else fails, offer a sweeter deal to a weaker competitor (or a number of weaker competitors).
And that's an important distinction, because it means that Apple is declaring that they can consider web-based, nothing-to-do-with-the-iPad functionality within their rights to regulate. Not a good precedent to set, especially since Apple's shown itself to be aggressively censorship-happy in their App Store policies.
A shift in Amazon's selling patterns, by itself, shows that e-Books are now mainstream?
I disagree, for two main reasons. One, Amazon is already an online retailer, and the main draws of online purchasing (immediacy of purchase, not having to go anywhere, etc) apply to e-Books, often more-so. Two, book-buying is an enthusiast-driven market - so high volume shifts in purchasing can come out of small population segments.
The sample thing is really useful, and the lack of non-English books is a problem - not my problem, sad monolingual chump that I am, but a problem. My personal pet peeves are DRM and price.
They are selling remarkably well to hardcore book enthusiasts - eBook owners are still a minority. My hope is that when readers hit $80 and books hit $6 or so, we'll actually see them as a driver of mainstream adoption.
Also, tons of people read out of copyright stuff - Austen, Shakespeare, etc, are really, really popular. They don't tend to make up the entirety of most people's reading material, but it's not an uncompelling set of books - and as copyright creeps over the mid 1900s, it's just going to get more compelling.
I'm a huge fan of eBooks, and I love my Kindle - but I don't buy many books from Amazon; and those tend to be the ones where there's a positive price-difference from the paperback. It's not the only draw possible, or even the only draw that leads me to purchase them, but it is a factor.
I think he was talking about the resources to make another copy of the book. Hardback book: page printing, cutting, binding, cover, shipping. Ebook: sending a few megabits of data.
Maybe, but I don't think it's clear which he's referring to. When I think "producing an eBook," I don't think "just the physical part of the chain." If so, though, my objection is pretty much withdrawn.
And replaced, unfortunately - printing more copies of a physical book that's already published can be a MUCH cheaper process than digitization, actually - at least digitization to publishable standards of a book with average sales numbers. And keep in mind that, while the prices for web-hosting, discovery services, etc, are low, they aren't zero - and literally centuries of bulk printing and warehousing has rendered that process fairly cheap when managed well. And this digitization cost, unlike edition, advertisement, etc, is ONLY amortized over the digital copy, because you don't have to digitize a paper book to sell it. Of course, this is true in reverse - distribution and printing are only amortized over paper. This cost does go down substantially with books where both can be created from the same master documents, but it wasn't the largest part of the book's cost to begin with.
Additionally, the places where money IS being saved aren't actually attached to the publisher - because the publisher doesn't normally pay costs of transport, warehousing, etc. It's the distributor and the retailer that save money (although not as much as is generally claimed, for reasons above). Which brings it back to Amazon and Barnes and Noble, in both cases. Aha! I found an article I read that explains this - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html.
The one last thing I would like to say is that we all know that book sales operate on extremely narrow margins; while it would be great to see some kind of savings out of e-Books, customers aren't actually entitled to the entire sum total of the price difference, especially in early stages where the infrastructure is still being built. Again, we should damn well see some savings, and the market won't bear the costs they're charging - but part of those costs are a much saner royalty structure for authors, which makes back-catalog sales MATTER even if you're not selling millions of books a year. So the "ALL EBOOKS THREE DOLLARS!" crowd isn't really realistic (I realize that you're not coming from that POV - sorry this has generalized out so much).
It just irks me sometimes that people, supposed "Information Age," can't even be bothered to read the things sourced in the link before they wander off into hypothetical-town.
Actually, nothing he said is false, and also, library patronage is seeing a rise lately. FUNDING is falling, true; but libraries serve a variety of social functions, serve as the main driver for many literacy programs, facilitate research in any number of areas, and, oh yeah, generate royalties through book purchasing.
And the "libraries hurt authors" chestnut has been stupid since roughly the 1800s. If you can't bother to do enough reading to debunk that crap, I can't be bothered to hold your hand through it.
Additionally, the impact of libraries is larger on certain populations - namely, those who can't afford books and other services offered by libraries (including the kind of open access to the internet required for participation in your "digital world").
Those millions of free eBooks - where do you think a lot of them came from? Magic fairies? A huge percentage of the people involved in Gutenberg work at libraries. Hell, half their mirrors are on various library-owned servers. You know where the books Google scans come from? Largely libraries. Oh, shit, and you know where the metadata that lets you find those books comes from? The OCLC - the L in which stands for, you guessed it, Libraries. I just interviewed for an internship there - they're looking for librarians with traditional cataloguing skills.
So, how does this argument not apply to paper books? In fact, it's actually a better argument for paper books, because most libraries have long practice in being very convenient to borrow paper books from, whereas most eBook lending programs aren't very convenient at all; usually they're so rights-encumbered that they give up most of the advantages of being digital copies.
I'm a grad student for Library and Information Science, in my last semester. While it's great when people contribute to libraries, it's not a tragedy when they buy books for themselves.
If you're reading primarily Gutenberg and other open documents, there's not really a practical difference there (a principle difference is fine, of course). Their 1984 moment (which was forced by the publisher, legally the correct action, and reversed basically immediately) wouldn't have affected your Gutenberg books, because you don't buy them through Amazon, and their recall only applies to books with their DRM.
Again, if it's just "Amazon were dicks, yo," 100% with you there. Although, given that e-Book sales are largely handled under licensing law, rather than sales, it's hard to come up with something else Amazon could do, really.
I've got a similar problem with exploding house syndrome - although I haven't had your problems with passing the book around. Me and my wife (and my roommate, come to think of it) have Kindles, and so out-of-copyright stuff is actually more convenient - we don't have to wait for the first person to finish the book.
I feel like I'm coming off as if I'm way more critical of your points here than I actually mean to be - I mostly agree with your conclusions, just not all of your premises. One thing I do disagree with strongle is that an eBook is "inherently" less valuable than a physical book. It's value is different - it's higher convenience in some ways, lower in others. You can't lend it (if it has DRM), but you can also re-download it if the file gets lost. You don't have the physical object (item fetish), but you also don't have the physical object (space clogger). It's an apples/oranges comparison. I think the industry is complicit with making it LOOK like an Apples/Apples comparison, though - lending, attachment to physical stores, and other features are meant to make eBooks seem like an exact analogue to physical books; but they aren't. Even with DRM free books, the qualities of and rights attached to what you're buying are radically different than the rights and qualities attached to a physical book. You're not buying, you're licensing, and it has to be that way, to a certain extent.
By the way, if "cracked" is your "mine" criteria, the DRM on both Kindle and Nook are quite thoroughly broken, and reasonably easy tools for doing so are freely available. And seriously, no part of this is meant to be offensive or mean - I think you make a lot of good points, and I'm trying to talk coherently with you. Which I probably shouldn't be trying to do at 2 in the morning after a 12 hour work/school day.
I love my second gen, but looking at the third gen, I have to say - getting rid of the goddamned stick has to be almost worth the price of admission all on its own. Seriously, I can't count the number of accidental deletions that thing has caused.
One thing to keep in mind: there aren't minimal resources required, because most of the cost of publishing a book isn't the physical manufacturing/shipping/etc; it's edition, author advances, advertising, and other processes that wouldn't disappear even if the book was exclusively digital. Granted, most books aren't - which means that these costs are spread across both physical and e-Book sales, not that e-Book copies somehow cost nothing to make. Additionally, depending on the publication process and eBook store, reformatting and edition may have to take place when converting from the files used to create the physical book and the eBook edition.
That being said, eBook prices are still unreasonable, and they ARE competing with a lot of compelling free material. Something has to give - and I think many people will be using their readers primarily for Gutenberg until (paperback-equivalent) prices drop into a saner, 4-6 dollar range.
Also, "LONG LIVE THE FIGHTERS!" - Paul Atreides, The Unfortunate Motion Picture Version of Dune's Trailer, But Not The Film Itself, Because Who Wants a Rallying Speech in an 80s SciFi Movie, AMIRITE?
I've bought about 12 books for my Kindle so far and 11 of them have been priced at £0.00. So I'm with the suspicion that they are including those in the numbers for what sells the most.
They are explicitly not; maybe less suspicion and more fact checking next time?
No, they're not price-fixed; they're priced out of the market. Being too expensive is not price-fixing.
No, it's not 100%; the Kindle edition of Haruki Murakami's After the Quake is about two dollars cheaper, to pick the most recent example that I've purchased. Also, if you're into space opera or military sci-fi, Baen's e-Book store is MUCH cheaper than printed copies ($4-$6, generally - higher for brand new or pre-release stuff).
I do agree that eReaders are unlikely to bring large cost savings if you don't count the vast amount of free material out there. But, well, it's kind of Vast. I mean, I've saved somewhere between $90 and $140 on out of copyright stuff that I would have bought, and I've had my Kindle for a year. Now, I might not have bought all of those, but the ones I wouldn't have bought, it's because I couldn't have FOUND copies, at least not easily. And if I was back in college, doing a Literature degree? The Kindle would have saved me money by the end of the first semester. So there are use-cases that make an eReader economical. I don't quite meet them, but four or five years ago, I would have.
If they're doing serious archival tiffs to least significant detail, the files might be much, much bigger than that. The BPL's original scans come in at multiple GIGABYTES per scan; they actually have to drop the final files down significantly from their original size, in order to fit into their allotted space.
You gonna pony up the scratch for the OCR and indexing work that would take? I mean, if you've got a spare couple million or twelve, it'd be pretty awesome - us liberry folks'll get right on it.
Seriously, though - that would be incredibly awesome, but libraries don't get the kind of funding or have the kind of manpower it would take to do those things with the level of accuracy that would be required. And these collections are HUGE... again, I think JFK has something like 30,000 feet of archival records that haven't even been cataloged yet.
I think it's actually through a UMass-funded project that they're getting this stuff up to begin with; the library's internal admin was running everything off of an Access database as recently as last year.
Is there something out of whack? Because, if they're making high quality (say, 20% resolution from the archival tiffs) photos available, 100mb seems perfectly reasonable to me. If it includes overhead (successive scaling images, for example), it becomes downright conservative.
The previous guy's tone was out of line, but he's more or less right, in that 100mb images (and significantly larger videos, and potentially equivalent or larger audio) is probably more than reasonable for the display-quality assets for a federally funded digital library. Hell, the BPL, whose digitization program is funded off a fairly small, non-repeating grant, routinely keeps 2-4gig archival images around; they scan at around 16gigs for maps with fine detail.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh. If you're correct, I'm still of the mind that it's a bad policy, but it's less of a "Holy Shit Personal Control" issue.
The article definitely states that Amazon is also under the gun, but it's not sourced - do you have a source for this?
Hmmm.
I can definitely see an argument for that - let's say "continuing to reinforce the bad precedent."
If you restrict the facts to those explicitly mentioned above, maybe that makes sense. Unfortunately, Apple already has rules in place that specify that any eBook sold through their store CANNOT be sold for less at a competing store. Amazon can't charge more if they have to go through the iBooks store - this is an established, already extant policy. And since they can't charge more, the Apple 30% essentially has to come out of their own share. This is especially a problem from Amazon's point of view because this is a surcharge for a set of services that they not only provide on their own, and can't stop providing, but that they provide superior versions of on their own.
This isn't something that Apple could miss - this is the whole POINT of Apple's revision of the rules. They're trying to drive Amazon off the Kindle, to reduce competition for their own eBook store.
The other disadvantage is that Apple is declaring that use of the web browser on their device is covered by their sales regulation - which is problematic for various reasons.
Finally, you want them to "keep" the cost of the devices down? Really? Neither the iPhone nor the iPad are subsidized devices, and they're both sold at a substantial profit on the hardware. Apple doesn't have a history of dropping costs due to new revenue streams - it's counter their model of selling their goods as luxury or premium items.
He's flaming, you're inaccurate, let's call the whole thing a wash.
Apple's neither the magical cheapness fairy who saved music, nor some sort of cartoon supervillain who's going to use iPads to take over the universe. What they are is a managed-hardware company with minor arms in software and PC sales. Unfortunately in many respects, they have an institutional habit of trying to use their hardware management to extend vendor lock-in, at the expense of business competition and personal freedom on those devices. In this case, they're trying to prevent superior eBook services from competing on their devices, at least without Apple getting an unearned cut of the proceedings.
TL;DR Version: Just because they made beneficial decisions in the music business (for selfish reasons, and mostly over ten years ago) doesn't mean that they aren't being anti-competitive right now.
Who's the middleman, who's the source, and where are people saving money? This doesn't match up with the article, the summary, or the parent.
Apple sold a device. They are intermediaries for programs that can be run on the device. They also run a (second-rate) eBook store, with delivery to the device.
Amazon also runs an eBook store, with delivery to the device. Due to Apple's restrictions on what you can and can't do with the device, they run the actual "store" part of their eBook store from a website over a browser.
Apple is now trying to force them to run their eBook store through Apple's, in order to take commission on Amazon's sales on the device.
Both of the players are middlemen, in the sense that they are retailers. Amazon getting squeezed out doesn't save anyone money; all it does is make Amazon's books unavailable on the device.
It's an affluent market, and certainly a large portion of the market for Smartphones/Tablets, but I question how big section of Amazon's and/or B&N's market it is. I know Kindle books are more popular on iPad than Apple's, but Apple's is a non-entity in sales terms, if I recall correctly; and part of the wonder of Amazon's multi-device model is that, while people stop being able to read the books on their iPad/Phone, they don't actually stop being able to read them, period.
I imagine a lot of the people who have significant money invested in Kindle book collections will curse briefly, and then pick up a Kindle/Nook/NookColor/AndroidPhone.
If you can afford an iPad, you can probably afford to pick up another device if your iPad stops doing what you want. And past a certain number of already purchased Kindle books, that could even be a reasonable economic decision, at least if piracy is off the table.
Why do you imagine this? Apple is (in)famous for using its ownership of hardware to shut out competitors; for example, any number of music stores with more content back in the early iTunes days. If Amazon flounces, well, it would be a setback for the iPad users, but most of them are already bought into the device for $500+; they're unlikely to drop the device entirely, and any software they buy through it goes through Apple.
It's at least as likely that Apple will either find partners willing to play by their rules, or, if all else fails, offer a sweeter deal to a weaker competitor (or a number of weaker competitors).
And that's an important distinction, because it means that Apple is declaring that they can consider web-based, nothing-to-do-with-the-iPad functionality within their rights to regulate. Not a good precedent to set, especially since Apple's shown itself to be aggressively censorship-happy in their App Store policies.
So, I'm curious - how do people do this without getting the book wet?
I've never managed to do so, and I'd deeply, deeply love to manage it.
A shift in Amazon's selling patterns, by itself, shows that e-Books are now mainstream? I disagree, for two main reasons. One, Amazon is already an online retailer, and the main draws of online purchasing (immediacy of purchase, not having to go anywhere, etc) apply to e-Books, often more-so. Two, book-buying is an enthusiast-driven market - so high volume shifts in purchasing can come out of small population segments. The sample thing is really useful, and the lack of non-English books is a problem - not my problem, sad monolingual chump that I am, but a problem. My personal pet peeves are DRM and price.
They are selling remarkably well to hardcore book enthusiasts - eBook owners are still a minority. My hope is that when readers hit $80 and books hit $6 or so, we'll actually see them as a driver of mainstream adoption.
Also, tons of people read out of copyright stuff - Austen, Shakespeare, etc, are really, really popular. They don't tend to make up the entirety of most people's reading material, but it's not an uncompelling set of books - and as copyright creeps over the mid 1900s, it's just going to get more compelling.
I'm a huge fan of eBooks, and I love my Kindle - but I don't buy many books from Amazon; and those tend to be the ones where there's a positive price-difference from the paperback. It's not the only draw possible, or even the only draw that leads me to purchase them, but it is a factor.
Maybe, but I don't think it's clear which he's referring to. When I think "producing an eBook," I don't think "just the physical part of the chain." If so, though, my objection is pretty much withdrawn.
And replaced, unfortunately - printing more copies of a physical book that's already published can be a MUCH cheaper process than digitization, actually - at least digitization to publishable standards of a book with average sales numbers. And keep in mind that, while the prices for web-hosting, discovery services, etc, are low, they aren't zero - and literally centuries of bulk printing and warehousing has rendered that process fairly cheap when managed well. And this digitization cost, unlike edition, advertisement, etc, is ONLY amortized over the digital copy, because you don't have to digitize a paper book to sell it. Of course, this is true in reverse - distribution and printing are only amortized over paper. This cost does go down substantially with books where both can be created from the same master documents, but it wasn't the largest part of the book's cost to begin with.
Additionally, the places where money IS being saved aren't actually attached to the publisher - because the publisher doesn't normally pay costs of transport, warehousing, etc. It's the distributor and the retailer that save money (although not as much as is generally claimed, for reasons above). Which brings it back to Amazon and Barnes and Noble, in both cases. Aha! I found an article I read that explains this - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html .
The one last thing I would like to say is that we all know that book sales operate on extremely narrow margins; while it would be great to see some kind of savings out of e-Books, customers aren't actually entitled to the entire sum total of the price difference, especially in early stages where the infrastructure is still being built. Again, we should damn well see some savings, and the market won't bear the costs they're charging - but part of those costs are a much saner royalty structure for authors, which makes back-catalog sales MATTER even if you're not selling millions of books a year. So the "ALL EBOOKS THREE DOLLARS!" crowd isn't really realistic (I realize that you're not coming from that POV - sorry this has generalized out so much).
Hah!
It just irks me sometimes that people, supposed "Information Age," can't even be bothered to read the things sourced in the link before they wander off into hypothetical-town.
The paperback's discounted heavily - its list price is $14.95.
That being said, prices need to come down - I think something in the #12-16 range for new releases, fading to two dollars under paperback price.
Actually, nothing he said is false, and also, library patronage is seeing a rise lately. FUNDING is falling, true; but libraries serve a variety of social functions, serve as the main driver for many literacy programs, facilitate research in any number of areas, and, oh yeah, generate royalties through book purchasing.
And the "libraries hurt authors" chestnut has been stupid since roughly the 1800s. If you can't bother to do enough reading to debunk that crap, I can't be bothered to hold your hand through it.
Additionally, the impact of libraries is larger on certain populations - namely, those who can't afford books and other services offered by libraries (including the kind of open access to the internet required for participation in your "digital world").
Those millions of free eBooks - where do you think a lot of them came from? Magic fairies? A huge percentage of the people involved in Gutenberg work at libraries. Hell, half their mirrors are on various library-owned servers. You know where the books Google scans come from? Largely libraries. Oh, shit, and you know where the metadata that lets you find those books comes from? The OCLC - the L in which stands for, you guessed it, Libraries. I just interviewed for an internship there - they're looking for librarians with traditional cataloguing skills.
So, how does this argument not apply to paper books? In fact, it's actually a better argument for paper books, because most libraries have long practice in being very convenient to borrow paper books from, whereas most eBook lending programs aren't very convenient at all; usually they're so rights-encumbered that they give up most of the advantages of being digital copies.
I'm a grad student for Library and Information Science, in my last semester. While it's great when people contribute to libraries, it's not a tragedy when they buy books for themselves.
If you're reading primarily Gutenberg and other open documents, there's not really a practical difference there (a principle difference is fine, of course). Their 1984 moment (which was forced by the publisher, legally the correct action, and reversed basically immediately) wouldn't have affected your Gutenberg books, because you don't buy them through Amazon, and their recall only applies to books with their DRM.
Again, if it's just "Amazon were dicks, yo," 100% with you there. Although, given that e-Book sales are largely handled under licensing law, rather than sales, it's hard to come up with something else Amazon could do, really.
I've got a similar problem with exploding house syndrome - although I haven't had your problems with passing the book around. Me and my wife (and my roommate, come to think of it) have Kindles, and so out-of-copyright stuff is actually more convenient - we don't have to wait for the first person to finish the book.
I feel like I'm coming off as if I'm way more critical of your points here than I actually mean to be - I mostly agree with your conclusions, just not all of your premises. One thing I do disagree with strongle is that an eBook is "inherently" less valuable than a physical book. It's value is different - it's higher convenience in some ways, lower in others. You can't lend it (if it has DRM), but you can also re-download it if the file gets lost. You don't have the physical object (item fetish), but you also don't have the physical object (space clogger). It's an apples/oranges comparison. I think the industry is complicit with making it LOOK like an Apples/Apples comparison, though - lending, attachment to physical stores, and other features are meant to make eBooks seem like an exact analogue to physical books; but they aren't. Even with DRM free books, the qualities of and rights attached to what you're buying are radically different than the rights and qualities attached to a physical book. You're not buying, you're licensing, and it has to be that way, to a certain extent.
By the way, if "cracked" is your "mine" criteria, the DRM on both Kindle and Nook are quite thoroughly broken, and reasonably easy tools for doing so are freely available. And seriously, no part of this is meant to be offensive or mean - I think you make a lot of good points, and I'm trying to talk coherently with you. Which I probably shouldn't be trying to do at 2 in the morning after a 12 hour work/school day.
I love my second gen, but looking at the third gen, I have to say - getting rid of the goddamned stick has to be almost worth the price of admission all on its own. Seriously, I can't count the number of accidental deletions that thing has caused.
One thing to keep in mind: there aren't minimal resources required, because most of the cost of publishing a book isn't the physical manufacturing/shipping/etc; it's edition, author advances, advertising, and other processes that wouldn't disappear even if the book was exclusively digital. Granted, most books aren't - which means that these costs are spread across both physical and e-Book sales, not that e-Book copies somehow cost nothing to make. Additionally, depending on the publication process and eBook store, reformatting and edition may have to take place when converting from the files used to create the physical book and the eBook edition.
That being said, eBook prices are still unreasonable, and they ARE competing with a lot of compelling free material. Something has to give - and I think many people will be using their readers primarily for Gutenberg until (paperback-equivalent) prices drop into a saner, 4-6 dollar range.
Also, "LONG LIVE THE FIGHTERS!" - Paul Atreides, The Unfortunate Motion Picture Version of Dune's Trailer, But Not The Film Itself, Because Who Wants a Rallying Speech in an 80s SciFi Movie, AMIRITE?
They are explicitly not; maybe less suspicion and more fact checking next time?
Well, then they probably want the killer's archives, not JFK's. I mean, it's not like he had paperwork on his own assassination.
If they're doing serious archival tiffs to least significant detail, the files might be much, much bigger than that. The BPL's original scans come in at multiple GIGABYTES per scan; they actually have to drop the final files down significantly from their original size, in order to fit into their allotted space.
You gonna pony up the scratch for the OCR and indexing work that would take? I mean, if you've got a spare couple million or twelve, it'd be pretty awesome - us liberry folks'll get right on it.
Seriously, though - that would be incredibly awesome, but libraries don't get the kind of funding or have the kind of manpower it would take to do those things with the level of accuracy that would be required. And these collections are HUGE... again, I think JFK has something like 30,000 feet of archival records that haven't even been cataloged yet.
I think it's actually through a UMass-funded project that they're getting this stuff up to begin with; the library's internal admin was running everything off of an Access database as recently as last year.
Is there something out of whack? Because, if they're making high quality (say, 20% resolution from the archival tiffs) photos available, 100mb seems perfectly reasonable to me. If it includes overhead (successive scaling images, for example), it becomes downright conservative.
The previous guy's tone was out of line, but he's more or less right, in that 100mb images (and significantly larger videos, and potentially equivalent or larger audio) is probably more than reasonable for the display-quality assets for a federally funded digital library. Hell, the BPL, whose digitization program is funded off a fairly small, non-repeating grant, routinely keeps 2-4gig archival images around; they scan at around 16gigs for maps with fine detail.