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Jan. 4th, 2010
e-Books: Averting a Digital Horror Story
Jan. 4th, 2010 03:54 pme-Books: Averting a Digital Horror Story
The protest is kind of stupid. If they sell digitally the lower price is offset by lower publishing costs. The consumer should not be paying the same for digital media as for physical media that have higher associated manufacturing costs. The ebook is mostly pure profit. There are no shipping costs, or paper to buy, mscjinery to run, and a hell of a lot less electricity used, sorry to say but it will also cut down on the number of physical man hours by employees. The impact on landfills would be tremendous, and libraries would be able to buy more books and house them in less space. Borrowing digital books would make the books available to more than one person at the time, instead of waiting for weeks or months for a chance to read a new release.
I freakin' love it. But industry is always petrified by change they don't control. In this case the consumer is making the rules, just as they have with music. The book industry needs to get their heads outta their a**es and make use of all the positive advantages of the situation rather than trying to make consumers do it their way. The music industry suffered a lot of backlash for doing the same thing. So publishers better get with the program real soon. The consumers have hte bit in their teeth and they're not going back to the old way.
This is one of those moments in history that you want to remember. I knew years ago that ebooks would become popular, and for the same reasons that digital copies of music became popular; Portability, storage space, price, and flexibility. I'm waiting for textbooks to go digital as well. It would be a lot cheaper for students to buy digital copies. Then the text book industry can't charge out the nose for new editions. It doesn't cost much to edit a digital file. They won't have students by the short hairs anymore.
The protest is kind of stupid. If they sell digitally the lower price is offset by lower publishing costs. The consumer should not be paying the same for digital media as for physical media that have higher associated manufacturing costs. The ebook is mostly pure profit. There are no shipping costs, or paper to buy, mscjinery to run, and a hell of a lot less electricity used, sorry to say but it will also cut down on the number of physical man hours by employees. The impact on landfills would be tremendous, and libraries would be able to buy more books and house them in less space. Borrowing digital books would make the books available to more than one person at the time, instead of waiting for weeks or months for a chance to read a new release.
I freakin' love it. But industry is always petrified by change they don't control. In this case the consumer is making the rules, just as they have with music. The book industry needs to get their heads outta their a**es and make use of all the positive advantages of the situation rather than trying to make consumers do it their way. The music industry suffered a lot of backlash for doing the same thing. So publishers better get with the program real soon. The consumers have hte bit in their teeth and they're not going back to the old way.
This is one of those moments in history that you want to remember. I knew years ago that ebooks would become popular, and for the same reasons that digital copies of music became popular; Portability, storage space, price, and flexibility. I'm waiting for textbooks to go digital as well. It would be a lot cheaper for students to buy digital copies. Then the text book industry can't charge out the nose for new editions. It doesn't cost much to edit a digital file. They won't have students by the short hairs anymore.