Today I came across an interesting blurb in the new york times blogging section about electronic gadgets and the like. This blog post, published/posted on April 8th, describes how some Amazon Kindle users and customers are upset with the price of some of the E-books they offer. The article can be found HERE They are so upset, infact, that they have begun to publicly threaten Amazon with a potential wave of digital piracy.
Upset kindle users are beginning to voice a public outcry pertaining to digital ebooks being priced over $10. These users feel this price is extremely rash and unwarranted due to the comparison in price to an actual book. These users do not feel that it is fair for an ebook to be priced at $10 when the physical copy of the book may be priced at $15. The upset Amazon customers' complaints is that this is not a proper proportion of pricing considering the substantially less capabilities of a digital book in comparison to a hardbound, physical one.
The amazon users merely declare that if Amazon does not reconsider its pricing model, then they will dedicate themselves to the illegal replication and online distribution of these ebooks. Their plan is to do for digital books what MP3s did for digital music.
This proposes an interesting question. What is the actual numerical value/worth of possessing physical media over digital media? One of the primary arguments coming from the disgruntled Amazon customers is that a physical book can be shared, unlike the digital E-book. This really presents itsself as a justified argument to me. With a physical book, you pay a single price for it, but all friends and family of the purchasser will be able to read it as well, providing it has been loaned out to them. This implies that a single purchase is equal to an infinite number of reading experiences (of the same book of course). Is it really fair for a book to charge 2/3of the price even though its readership restriction goes from infinite to just one?
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