Dear all,
Would someone please explain to me how it is that the .mobi (ebook) version of a book costs around 13$ while the used paper copy costs 0.01$? Is this a case of supply-demand? Because then...how is the supply limited? It's digital. Making a copy of a digital book doesn't take that much resources or energy, even compared to the making of mass-market paperbacks (which still requires paper making and binding and such). Most authors these days have their final transcript in digital format, anyway, and it's not that hard to convert .doc to ebook formats. I've done that before too. There are even free online software for these sort of things.
Perhaps it's because the paper-copy is "used"? But...it's digital. I mean how do you even tell apart "used" from "new" copies? But if that were the case, where can I get used digital books? Because seriously, I don't mind used books. Either paper-copy or digitally.
This mini-rant is brought to you by my visit to the library website. I'm one of those people who prefer not to buy a book until I've read it and know that I like it. I read fast. To entertain me for extended length of time requires something either massive or going to the library (whose schedule overlaps with mine by only two hours every week) every week. I have a kindle. I have gone through the entire SD library ebooks collection. There're just over 2000 books. There are five that overlaps with my to-read list (121 books so far). They all have wait-lists ranging from 6 to 36 people. Hunting on the internet has not helped much.
Help.
[edit 11:00]
New thought: I hate to default to thinking the worse of everyone, but I realized that it's possible for it still be a supply-demand situation where, because the supplier knows the demand is high, they can purposefully limit the supply in order to charge higher prices and therefore obtain more profit (and they don't even have to subtract printing and distribution costs for ebooks).
Thoughts?
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