Pocket PC eBooks Watch - eBook and beyond  
 http://cebooks.blogspot.com 

Believe it or not continued:
This is Ken Mattern's posting from newsgroup regarding David Swager's price comparison on Hardbook, Paperback and unreadable ebook in Amazon titled The Educated Child.
"I've been thinking about this since I saw David's comments posted at Jerry's site yesterday. Here is what I think the idiocy is all about.
In the United States (for those reading this who don't know about Katel and all the rest) you will often see advertisements on television for music albums, such as "Singers and Songwriters of the 80s". These albums are available on either cassette tape or CD - not available in stores ;-}.
The tapes almost always sell for $12.95 while the CDs sell for $18.95. We all know that the cost for reproducing a cassette tape is significantly higher than that for reproducing a CD, both in time and money. So why do they sell the CD for so much more?
The answer is in the perceived "advance in technology". CDs are more technologically advanced, therefore they must cost more to manufacture. Or so the consumer is lead to believe.
Of course the profit margins for this advanced technology are so much greater as well. (wink, wink)
Now take that marketing idea to eBooks:
eBooks are really advanced technology. Gutenberg invented his printing press back in the 1500s (I think) and the technology has not changed significantly. It doesn't matter that the cost of reproducing 10,000 paper bound hard cover books is high enough to justify the selling cost. It doesn't matter that by removing the hard cover and reducing the page size that it costs significantly less to publish the same number of paper bound books. These are both OLD TECHNOLOGY. And, of course the technology for eBook publishing is BRAND NEW and to publish a quality eBook is prohibitively expensive (Believe me, I know. I am only able to publish 5 myself every Saturday - between mowing the lawn and doing my shopping). So naturally it costs so very much more to support this cutting edge and still emerging technology. New high technology simply costs more. So you have to pay more. Not to mention the profit motive - er margin.
So the unsuspecting purchaser is again duped into thinking that eBooks MUST be worth every penny that they charge. And they must be really special and hard to reproduce because they haven't figured out how to do it so that you can read it on more than two computers, and even more so because they haven't figured out the technology to move them to these new Pocket PC thingies - whatever they are. So I must shell out more money for more quality. After all I am a cutting edge consumer.
The problem is, my friends, that we are a lot more savvy about things like paper books vs eBooks than the targeted market for "Singers and Songwriters of the 80s"."

posted by Jerry permanent link