We are disagreeing only on price. I agree that that design work is valuable. I just don't think that it's worth $5/copy. Because it only has to be done once, ever, no matter how many copies are sold.
The bandwidth to serve it to you? Compared with the cost of physically transporting a book? Negligible. A few cents.
The permanent storage space to store all your metadata is on your device, not on their servers, I think you'll find. (I could be wrong on that. I haven't looked into how that stuff is handled.)
Given that I've already paid the author by buying the physical book, I'd be willing to pay a dollar or two for the digital version. But not $6
(Gutenberg texts aren't really a good comparison, I feel. Because they are scanned from physical sources, there is a lot of extraneous crap that has to be removed. A new book as received from an author contains only the text. No pagination, page numbers, running heads, Chapter heads, thumb prints, colophons, marginalia.... Removing all that extra data to get back to the bare text takes a lot of work, which is done by volunteers with vastly varying levels of skill. Then someone can start adding layout data for ebook readers.)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 11:57 am (UTC)I agree that that design work is valuable. I just don't think that it's worth $5/copy. Because it only has to be done once, ever, no matter how many copies are sold.
The bandwidth to serve it to you? Compared with the cost of physically transporting a book? Negligible. A few cents.
The permanent storage space to store all your metadata is on your device, not on their servers, I think you'll find. (I could be wrong on that. I haven't looked into how that stuff is handled.)
Given that I've already paid the author by buying the physical book, I'd be willing to pay a dollar or two for the digital version. But not $6
(Gutenberg texts aren't really a good comparison, I feel. Because they are scanned from physical sources, there is a lot of extraneous crap that has to be removed. A new book as received from an author contains only the text. No pagination, page numbers, running heads, Chapter heads, thumb prints, colophons, marginalia.... Removing all that extra data to get back to the bare text takes a lot of work, which is done by volunteers with vastly varying levels of skill. Then someone can start adding layout data for ebook readers.)