Re: NY Times Ethicist Condones Ripping Off E-books

Well said, Chris! And Let's not forget the semi-deliberate strategy of 
allowing older -- reviewed and assessed -- books to go out of print and 
become impossible to find, in order to force customers into buying 
untried new ones. I have already commented several times on this list on 
the bizarre fact that I can walk into an ordinary CD store and purchase 
a Bowie album from 1973 or a Bach cantata composed in 1721, but I can't 
walk into an ordinary retail bookshop and find more than half-a-dozen 
novels issued before 2008.

The same could now be said of iTunes versus non-PG eBook distributors.

Jon.

Chris Smith wrote:
> I could look across the shelves, and all the paperbacks were $2.99 (this
> was a while ago...). Some would be worth it - and some would not. But the
> only way to sort the good from the drek was to buy them. In some larger
> sense, good material might win out over bad, but I as the individual
> reader didn't see the benefits. For the reader, it was "caveat emptor".
>
> Book publishers were benefiting from this type of market. You could offer
> drek, and if people bought it, they were stuck with it. Sell enough
> different titles of drek, and you could still make money, even though most
> buyers should only have been satisfied with something better.
>
> Some stores did offer "goods satisfactory or money refunded" (*), but it
> never seemed to be bookstores. Note that the criteria is *satisfaction*,
> not just *didn't fail*.
>
> Now we have the possibility (through many types of transfers) for readers
> to find the material they like first, and *then* pay for it. They don't
> want to accept the risk of non-satisfaction anymore. Why should they? They
> want "books satisfactory or money refunded". But since no store is
> offering this, they make it up themselves, on a sort of ad-hoc basis. It
> doesn't always work very well, as we are seeing.
>   



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