mymediamusings

Should Kindle Fear Literate Pirates?

: Image by Jezlyn26 via Flickr

Some Kindle users are upset over the $10+ cost of eBooks for the device and have begun to tag such books in an effort to convince others to boycott them and somehow drive down the price.

I’m not so sure this particular effort will have the desired effect. However, the guys at Freakonomics are on the right track:

One of the boycotters’ main complaints: you can’t lend out your e-books to friends. When digital music fans were confronted with this problem, they just made illegal copies.

As we have seen ad nauseum in the music world, once a product is no longer controlled by a physical scarcity (i.e. paper books) but can instead be transimited in a purely digital and thus unlimited manner, it becomes very difficult to convince consumers to pay the same amount they once paid for the hard good.

If the publishing industry isn’t quick to respond it is hard to imagine why there wouldn’t quickly be a pirate market that succeeded in meeting consumer needs instead.

LINK