Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2012–2019years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- An apple isn't the best analogy since the apple market is competitive. The market for "Principles of Economics: Global Financial Crisis Edition, 6th Edition" (or any other book or ebook) is a government-granted monopoly, so the two situations aren't completely comparable
This is my own personal belief, but my main objection to ebook pricing is the apparent price collusion that is going on in the publishing market (here's a link to a news story about one DOJ case: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75028.html). This isn't the first time that a format change prompted increased prices: when the CD was introduced, music labels charged much higher prices for CDs than prior formats -- notably, all of the labels also seemed to converge on a single, higher price. Arguably, the higher price was justifed due to better audio fidelity; maybe the same could be said for ebooks' features vs dead tree books. For at least a decade $20 CDs were the norm despite much lower music prices in the cassette era and much lower prices now. Check out Knopper's 'Appetite for Self-Destruction' or Kernfeld's 'Pop Song Piracy' if you're interested in the music industry specifically.
To cut it short: in a government-granted monopolized market, it seems a bit fishy when the entire market lurches in the (same) higher priced direction simultaneously.
- 1. Musical taste is very highly subjective. There is arguably "bad" music, but there's a great deal of "good" music which fails to break through into popularity. Or which, having once been popular, falls from grace. Johann Sebastian Bach is a notable instance of this -- he'd languished into near complete obscurity until "rediscovered" (IIRC by Mendelsohn). One consequence is that a large portion of the Bach opus has been lost.
More recently there've been experiments in which multiple groups are exposed to non-mainstream music, separately. Each group picks "hits", but what's popular among one group isn't generally shared with others.
2. The music industry itself acts as a gatekeeper to the genre, both in selecting hits and in blocking access to alternative productions (or of alternative acts' and songwriters' access to the hit-making machine). Barry Kerner has covered one response to this in his book Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929, covering among other elements, fakebooks, songsheets, cassettes, and MP3s:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/popular-music/articl...
The "New Books Network" podcast series has an extended interview:
https://newbooksnetwork.com/barry-kernfeld-pop-song-piracy-d...
3. The YouTube channel responsible for promoting the works in question ... has seen them taken down due to copyright claims. Ironic irony is ironically ironic.
