Okay, #1 -- Dan Brown? Save your money. And your time. Seriously, just go watch some tv or something.
#2 -- Most books never get released in mass market. You only get a mass market printing if you have a successful hardcover release. It just costs too much otherwise. Hardcovers are priced so that the particular book won't lose the publisher too much money. Mass market sales are gravy, and are priced as such.
This is a tad different, because the books are sold in partnership with a revenue split. I'm sure Macmillian would be happy to sell ebooks to Amazon at hardcover wholesale and let Amazon do whatever they want with the price, but the Kindle store has a fixed split between publisher and Amazon.
They see the costs of manufacturing plummeting yet prices are rising.
Costs of manufacturing are not really changing any in the book market. The price of physically manufacturing a hardcover is around $2, max. So if you're saying that customers are expecting $30 hardcovers to be sold for $28... I'd imagine Macmillian and everybody would accommodate that.
Because obviously the only possible factor in the price of any good is the marginal cost of production, right?
You're posting a real cute argument, but you have to understand that selling ebooks cannibalizes hardcover sales, and sales of any kind are finite in nature. Price of goods sold will tend towards marginal cost of production only as the number of goods sold approaches infinity. Since no one can sell infinity of any given ebook, it doesn't matter how low the individual production costs are; you still have to recoup some of the fixed costs.
Over and above this, you're wrong about the definition of marginal cost of production -- because you're assuming that the good in question is the copy of the ebook. The ebook itself is the product, and it has a high marginal cost; for every additional ebook that a publisher brings to its catalog, there are very substantial, very real costs associated with exactly the things your parent posted. As they're on a per-ebook basis, they can also be considered marginal costs of producing the good that is a single ebook master copy.
So, sure. The marginal cost of producing additional kernels of corn on the same cob is nigh zero. But don't use that to claim that corn should be free until you've actually spent some time working on a farm...
There's a reasonable argument to be made that within popular music, most big hits are made, not born.
I.E. there isn't that much difference between J. Random Indy Band and the Next Big Thing, it's just the latter had the tremendous marketing arm of the studio pushing them into the glories of one-hit-wonderdom.
The same can't really be said for books, surprisingly. Mainly because you aren't exposed to the contents of a book unless you specifically try to be, while [generic crappy pop] music gets blasted at your ears anywhere you go, and even when its presence is under your control, its content may not be (like with the radio).
You think the interstate system was a failure? Well... given that the existence of the interstate infrastructure created the incentives that destroyed the locomotive as the main means of in-land shipping in America, and in other ways promoted the reliance on the automobile that's ended public transit in most areas and greatly exacerbated global warming... possibly yes. : p
But I think the parent's point was actually the same as yours -- cynicism about Everybody Else's willingness to do something that'll have a profit after the next quarterly earnings report.
Wait... what does the actual existence or non-existence of a god or gods have to do with people organizing through religion to do something good for others?
I think your conception of this is interesting from a pure economics standpoint, but it's a little off from how publishers are actually viewing the situation.
The hardcover release *is* the release, set at a price that the market will bear that attempts to maximize profits. Indeed, usually there's only that first run of hardcovers (with the exception of big hits). Books that meet or exceed expectations and are felt to still have legs then get a mass-market release, as "bonus" revenue, trying to squeeze a few more drops out of the rag.
I don't believe that there's as smooth or continuous a scale of when readers want to read something as you suggest. People either want to read it right away, or they'll read it when they get around to it. Besides, knowledge of a predictably dropping price would encourage most people to delay gratification longer than they ordinarily would ("eh, I'll read something else instead for another week").
This is a really common question, and it has to do with the economics of book publishing. Sorry for linking you to my own post, but the odds of you going back up to see it are slim, so: see here.
This is great in theory, but not how it works in practice.
In practice, publishers are terrified, because they make all their money in hardbacks. But nobody except for a few freaks (the "I'll never touch a paper book again!" crowd) is actually willing to pay hardback prices for an e-book. eBooks are a much better natural competitor to mass market paperbacks.
Well, okay, that's great, but why not just sell the ebook for cheaper? Amazon would love to. The problem is that the cost to print and bind an individual book (the unit cost) is pennies. Most of the price of a book is in the fixed (i.e. not-per-unit), upfront cost of editing, putting the files together, and (the big one) marketing. (And that's not just subway ads. It's mainly marketing to bookstores, and to the TINY HANDFUL of buyers who actually get to decide what books Borders and Barnes & Noble carry, and thus what Americans read.) Publishers cannot cope with this. Their business will collapse if they release ebooks at the same time as hardcovers, because the ebook would horrifically undercut their hardcover margins. But they cannot afford to set a market expectation that an ebook costs a reasonable (i.e. under-$15) amount. They cannot afford to do anything that discourages people from buying hardcovers; why cannibalize your own business? And they will not get fully behind the ebook platform so long as that fundamental logic stays the same.
That's for book publishers, anyway, which is what the parent was about. From TFS, it sounds like this is as much about the newspaper and magazine business, who seem to think that people will magically want to pay for their content if you put it on e-paper instead of the e-, er, internet. GLWT, lemme know how it works out, I'll just be over here browsing the real web from my smartphone...
Absolutely -- which is a great deal of why MMOs reduce to spreadsheet-balancing games. Ho-hum. I played a healer, so at least I was mostly interacting with somewhat-less-predictable human players, but it still winds up feeling about as fun as the "balance your checkbook" minigame...
One of the design -- well, choices, let's not call it a flaw per se -- of WoW is that serial death is the primary feedback/learning mechanism.
This is probably a consequence of the fact that the nigh-only way to interact with stuff in the game world is to kill it, and personally I find it quite tedious. But for WoW, unlike those other MUDs or D&D-style RPGs, it's "working as intended" for you to try a dungeon encounter a dozen times, dying each time as you learn what you're supposed to do and if you fail to make the execution perfect.
Personally I found it rather tedious, even when I was playing the game.
Imagine the outcry if the cops decided to selectively enforce theft, assault or rape cases
There certainly is a large degree of selective investigation of these kinds of crimes. Try reporting a stolen bike in NYC sometime, for instance; you'll get laughed out of the station. (Oh sure, they'll take your report and have you fill out paperwork, but that goes straight in the Round File as soon as the door's closed.) I believe (but don't have studies to hand) that assaults are investigated at much lower rates in neighborhoods of lower socio-economic standing. Sexual assault cases are also investigated far less diligently in acquaintance-rape situations than in "stranger in the bushes" situations, though they're both the same crime.
Neutralize the warlords and islamist extremists and the rest of the world might be more willing to invest the resources and capital required to help lift that country out of poverty.
Why in god's name would anyone be interested in doing that? A good rubbish dump is hard to come by, the resource-extraction industry is thriving, and China's already got the manufacturing thing squared away.
The rest of the world ignores Somalia because we don't need them. That is the logic of the market, the only one the current neoliberal global consensus acknowledges.
Well... from what you're saying, it's not a matter of "how long you've been around," it's a matter of whether or not the Dutch like you.
Either body sounds like it'd violate the "sovereign monopoly on the legitimate use of force" constraint of a modern government. The fact that the DEIC (which I'm assuming was operating like the BritishEIC) had European permission to go dick around in non-European countries with blatant disregard for their local governments doesn't seem very convincing to me.
Cowardly scumbags on the other hand, is a label I save for moral relativists.
Pray tell, what is the basis of your absolute morality? Do you have a non-opinion-based demonstration of its objective existence? If morality is absolute and objectively perceivable, why is it that different people have different moral compasses?
Well, if what you're saying is true, that would effectively just distribute the cost of piracy across the entire shipping system (including the makers and distributors of the goods shipped). So effectively piracy becomes a self-collected tax used to fund poorly distributed aid money in the country. Interesting...
Then obviously copyright -- or even any market incentive resulting from mass distribution -- is irrelevant to people's willingness to create, produce, and distribute books.
The sole argument in favor of copyright is this: strong monetary compensation to the artist is necessary for artistic works to be produced.
My point is not merely that people were making stuff before copyright (although they certainly were); it's that people have always been and continue in the present to produce work without expectation of considerable financial reward. You want to read books? People put plenty of them out on the Internet, and more to the point, the vast majority of published authors can count on their books to give them at best a modest additional income. Ditto for musicians. The printing press is irrelevant, because people who wrote books before it weren't expecting them to be widely read or to make a ton of money from them. They were hoping primarily for fame (and, it must be said, were typically of a class that meant they didn't need to earn a living anyway.)
Video games and movies do not fall effectively into this argument precisely because they aren't produced by individual artists. These are corporate products. Oh, sure, we talk about a film as being the work of the director, or the video game as the work of the designer, but there are literally hundreds of other people involved in the creation of these art forms, and it is not possible for a single person to coordinate all of that effort. Thus, the real irony here is that the only situation in which the argument for copyright actually works, is the one in which no artist is involved. The real argument for copyright is not "artists must be compensated" (since that's obviously irrelevant, as they almost always *aren't*) but "corporations must be profitable." Very well; but if that's what we're talking about here, then let's be clear in our terms.
The question then becomes, "are additional measures necessary to protect the profitability of corporations in the entertainment industry"? Well, video game publishers are doing just fine, so in that case it seems the current regime is functioning. Ultimately it's the movies that are really driving this. Movie companies are profitable, but not from box office (source). Release of movies to theatres is better conceived of as "R&D" for the industry's main businesses, the secondary video market and licensing to television. In any event, the best way for the movie industry to become more profitable would be to reduce inefficiencies in movie production, cutting the costs of making those high-budget box-office bombs. But the industry would rather legislate than reduce internal waste. Very well, but you can't expect the public to be sanguine about it. And, I'd add, the effectiveness of first-run movies in providing their primary function -- R&D for current cultural tastes -- is not really affected by piracy; it's just somewhat more lossy as a result.
Television revenue is affected by the impact of new distribution channels on television, but that's separate from a piracy issue. Movie companies have much more cause to worry about Netflix streaming than they do piracy in that segment.
That brings us to direct-to-consumer video sales. A valid perspective on this market is to consider piracy as an alternate channel for goods distribution with lower (but non-zero) costs to the consumer. In other words, people pirate because the offerings from the studios are overpriced in the market. But instead of improving their offerings and finding the price point which will actually maximize sales, the industry tries to legislate. (Not a sound move from an economic perspective, but what can you expect when you're big enough to own a government.) Another important point here is that the industry would like the decision makers to conceive of pirated movies as lost sales, but this is not so; typically a movie gets pirated as a faster alternative to the rental market. Pirated movies are crowd
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Okay, #1 -- Dan Brown? Save your money. And your time. Seriously, just go watch some tv or something.
#2 -- Most books never get released in mass market. You only get a mass market printing if you have a successful hardcover release. It just costs too much otherwise. Hardcovers are priced so that the particular book won't lose the publisher too much money. Mass market sales are gravy, and are priced as such.
This is a tad different, because the books are sold in partnership with a revenue split. I'm sure Macmillian would be happy to sell ebooks to Amazon at hardcover wholesale and let Amazon do whatever they want with the price, but the Kindle store has a fixed split between publisher and Amazon.
They see the costs of manufacturing plummeting yet prices are rising.
Costs of manufacturing are not really changing any in the book market. The price of physically manufacturing a hardcover is around $2, max. So if you're saying that customers are expecting $30 hardcovers to be sold for $28... I'd imagine Macmillian and everybody would accommodate that.
Because obviously the only possible factor in the price of any good is the marginal cost of production, right?
You're posting a real cute argument, but you have to understand that selling ebooks cannibalizes hardcover sales, and sales of any kind are finite in nature. Price of goods sold will tend towards marginal cost of production only as the number of goods sold approaches infinity. Since no one can sell infinity of any given ebook, it doesn't matter how low the individual production costs are; you still have to recoup some of the fixed costs.
Over and above this, you're wrong about the definition of marginal cost of production -- because you're assuming that the good in question is the copy of the ebook. The ebook itself is the product, and it has a high marginal cost; for every additional ebook that a publisher brings to its catalog, there are very substantial, very real costs associated with exactly the things your parent posted. As they're on a per-ebook basis, they can also be considered marginal costs of producing the good that is a single ebook master copy.
So, sure. The marginal cost of producing additional kernels of corn on the same cob is nigh zero. But don't use that to claim that corn should be free until you've actually spent some time working on a farm...
There's a reasonable argument to be made that within popular music, most big hits are made, not born.
I.E. there isn't that much difference between J. Random Indy Band and the Next Big Thing, it's just the latter had the tremendous marketing arm of the studio pushing them into the glories of one-hit-wonderdom.
The same can't really be said for books, surprisingly. Mainly because you aren't exposed to the contents of a book unless you specifically try to be, while [generic crappy pop] music gets blasted at your ears anywhere you go, and even when its presence is under your control, its content may not be (like with the radio).
You think the interstate system was a failure?
Well... given that the existence of the interstate infrastructure created the incentives that destroyed the locomotive as the main means of in-land shipping in America, and in other ways promoted the reliance on the automobile that's ended public transit in most areas and greatly exacerbated global warming... possibly yes. : p
But I think the parent's point was actually the same as yours -- cynicism about Everybody Else's willingness to do something that'll have a profit after the next quarterly earnings report.
You're forgetting the main Legal Issue in American jurisprudence:
The law is what whoever can actually afford the lawyers says it is.
Wait... what does the actual existence or non-existence of a god or gods have to do with people organizing through religion to do something good for others?
You must not know very many cultural Jews.
I think your conception of this is interesting from a pure economics standpoint, but it's a little off from how publishers are actually viewing the situation.
The hardcover release *is* the release, set at a price that the market will bear that attempts to maximize profits. Indeed, usually there's only that first run of hardcovers (with the exception of big hits). Books that meet or exceed expectations and are felt to still have legs then get a mass-market release, as "bonus" revenue, trying to squeeze a few more drops out of the rag.
I don't believe that there's as smooth or continuous a scale of when readers want to read something as you suggest. People either want to read it right away, or they'll read it when they get around to it. Besides, knowledge of a predictably dropping price would encourage most people to delay gratification longer than they ordinarily would ("eh, I'll read something else instead for another week").
This is a really common question, and it has to do with the economics of book publishing. Sorry for linking you to my own post, but the odds of you going back up to see it are slim, so: see here.
This is great in theory, but not how it works in practice.
In practice, publishers are terrified, because they make all their money in hardbacks. But nobody except for a few freaks (the "I'll never touch a paper book again!" crowd) is actually willing to pay hardback prices for an e-book. eBooks are a much better natural competitor to mass market paperbacks.
Well, okay, that's great, but why not just sell the ebook for cheaper? Amazon would love to. The problem is that the cost to print and bind an individual book (the unit cost) is pennies. Most of the price of a book is in the fixed (i.e. not-per-unit), upfront cost of editing, putting the files together, and (the big one) marketing. (And that's not just subway ads. It's mainly marketing to bookstores, and to the TINY HANDFUL of buyers who actually get to decide what books Borders and Barnes & Noble carry, and thus what Americans read.)
Publishers cannot cope with this. Their business will collapse if they release ebooks at the same time as hardcovers, because the ebook would horrifically undercut their hardcover margins. But they cannot afford to set a market expectation that an ebook costs a reasonable (i.e. under-$15) amount. They cannot afford to do anything that discourages people from buying hardcovers; why cannibalize your own business? And they will not get fully behind the ebook platform so long as that fundamental logic stays the same.
That's for book publishers, anyway, which is what the parent was about. From TFS, it sounds like this is as much about the newspaper and magazine business, who seem to think that people will magically want to pay for their content if you put it on e-paper instead of the e-, er, internet. GLWT, lemme know how it works out, I'll just be over here browsing the real web from my smartphone...
What's next, Google Breeder? Google computers decide who you're allowed to reproduce with, in order to best enrich the ecosystem of minds?
Yeah... you just give up a tiny bit of control over what the pets do :)
Absolutely -- which is a great deal of why MMOs reduce to spreadsheet-balancing games. Ho-hum. I played a healer, so at least I was mostly interacting with somewhat-less-predictable human players, but it still winds up feeling about as fun as the "balance your checkbook" minigame...
One of the design -- well, choices, let's not call it a flaw per se -- of WoW is that serial death is the primary feedback/learning mechanism.
This is probably a consequence of the fact that the nigh-only way to interact with stuff in the game world is to kill it, and personally I find it quite tedious. But for WoW, unlike those other MUDs or D&D-style RPGs, it's "working as intended" for you to try a dungeon encounter a dozen times, dying each time as you learn what you're supposed to do and if you fail to make the execution perfect.
Personally I found it rather tedious, even when I was playing the game.
Bravo!... ...unless he loses.
Imagine the outcry if the cops decided to selectively enforce theft, assault or rape cases
There certainly is a large degree of selective investigation of these kinds of crimes. Try reporting a stolen bike in NYC sometime, for instance; you'll get laughed out of the station. (Oh sure, they'll take your report and have you fill out paperwork, but that goes straight in the Round File as soon as the door's closed.)
I believe (but don't have studies to hand) that assaults are investigated at much lower rates in neighborhoods of lower socio-economic standing. Sexual assault cases are also investigated far less diligently in acquaintance-rape situations than in "stranger in the bushes" situations, though they're both the same crime.
Neutralize the warlords and islamist extremists and the rest of the world might be more willing to invest the resources and capital required to help lift that country out of poverty.
Why in god's name would anyone be interested in doing that? A good rubbish dump is hard to come by, the resource-extraction industry is thriving, and China's already got the manufacturing thing squared away.
The rest of the world ignores Somalia because we don't need them. That is the logic of the market, the only one the current neoliberal global consensus acknowledges.
Which regulation is it, exactly, that prevents shipping companies from paying to have pirates killed?
Well... from what you're saying, it's not a matter of "how long you've been around," it's a matter of whether or not the Dutch like you.
Either body sounds like it'd violate the "sovereign monopoly on the legitimate use of force" constraint of a modern government. The fact that the DEIC (which I'm assuming was operating like the BritishEIC) had European permission to go dick around in non-European countries with blatant disregard for their local governments doesn't seem very convincing to me.
Er... it looks like he was saying the warlords are running the piracy. And then you replied that you'd shoot yourself.
Cowardly scumbags on the other hand, is a label I save for moral relativists.
Pray tell, what is the basis of your absolute morality? Do you have a non-opinion-based demonstration of its objective existence?
If morality is absolute and objectively perceivable, why is it that different people have different moral compasses?
Well, if what you're saying is true, that would effectively just distribute the cost of piracy across the entire shipping system (including the makers and distributors of the goods shipped). So effectively piracy becomes a self-collected tax used to fund poorly distributed aid money in the country. Interesting...
Then obviously copyright -- or even any market incentive resulting from mass distribution -- is irrelevant to people's willingness to create, produce, and distribute books.
The sole argument in favor of copyright is this:
strong monetary compensation to the artist is necessary for artistic works to be produced.
My point is not merely that people were making stuff before copyright (although they certainly were); it's that people have always been and continue in the present to produce work without expectation of considerable financial reward. You want to read books? People put plenty of them out on the Internet, and more to the point, the vast majority of published authors can count on their books to give them at best a modest additional income. Ditto for musicians. The printing press is irrelevant, because people who wrote books before it weren't expecting them to be widely read or to make a ton of money from them. They were hoping primarily for fame (and, it must be said, were typically of a class that meant they didn't need to earn a living anyway.)
Video games and movies do not fall effectively into this argument precisely because they aren't produced by individual artists. These are corporate products. Oh, sure, we talk about a film as being the work of the director, or the video game as the work of the designer, but there are literally hundreds of other people involved in the creation of these art forms, and it is not possible for a single person to coordinate all of that effort.
Thus, the real irony here is that the only situation in which the argument for copyright actually works, is the one in which no artist is involved. The real argument for copyright is not "artists must be compensated" (since that's obviously irrelevant, as they almost always *aren't*) but "corporations must be profitable." Very well; but if that's what we're talking about here, then let's be clear in our terms.
The question then becomes, "are additional measures necessary to protect the profitability of corporations in the entertainment industry"? Well, video game publishers are doing just fine, so in that case it seems the current regime is functioning. Ultimately it's the movies that are really driving this. Movie companies are profitable, but not from box office (source). Release of movies to theatres is better conceived of as "R&D" for the industry's main businesses, the secondary video market and licensing to television. In any event, the best way for the movie industry to become more profitable would be to reduce inefficiencies in movie production, cutting the costs of making those high-budget box-office bombs. But the industry would rather legislate than reduce internal waste. Very well, but you can't expect the public to be sanguine about it. And, I'd add, the effectiveness of first-run movies in providing their primary function -- R&D for current cultural tastes -- is not really affected by piracy; it's just somewhat more lossy as a result.
Television revenue is affected by the impact of new distribution channels on television, but that's separate from a piracy issue. Movie companies have much more cause to worry about Netflix streaming than they do piracy in that segment.
That brings us to direct-to-consumer video sales. A valid perspective on this market is to consider piracy as an alternate channel for goods distribution with lower (but non-zero) costs to the consumer. In other words, people pirate because the offerings from the studios are overpriced in the market. But instead of improving their offerings and finding the price point which will actually maximize sales, the industry tries to legislate. (Not a sound move from an economic perspective, but what can you expect when you're big enough to own a government.) Another important point here is that the industry would like the decision makers to conceive of pirated movies as lost sales, but this is not so; typically a movie gets pirated as a faster alternative to the rental market. Pirated movies are crowd