Post originally by 2097 at 2004-04-24 09:47:37
Converted from Phorums BB System

I'm thinking that there might be a lot of costs involved with a printed book that goes away with a PDF. Writing, development and art - sure, all those things stay, as well as some (but not all) of the risks involved with printing.

I'm also thinking that the competition in the non-print world is a lot harsher since there's a lot of high-quality fan work going around these days. I'm guessing that this would affect supply/demand. I figure that back in the print-only days, there was a lot of difference between a beautiful, full-color hardback and a pile of b/w-xeroxes, so the "free" fanworks was seen as "out of the league" of professional stuff. These days, a group of amateurs can produce beautiful, full-color work as easy as printing via ghostscript or acrobat.

I'm also thinking of "value provided", and (perhaps more importantly) "perceived value provided". A printed book is a printed book. If the market can accept prices that are roughly half of what the same book would be in print, so be it. We'll see how it works out, and you may well be proven right.

(Ease of copying, in some cases illegal, is also a factor in perceived value.)

There's also the meta-argument of various economical systems - the manifacturing cost for a specific copy of a PDF is essentially zero, while it's a lot higher for books (especially if you have to print more than you can sell). In the current incarnation of the monetary market economy, preparation cost (which includes art, writing and developement) is usually factored in to the product price, as you posit, but there are theoretical alternatives including the street performer protocol (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/ )or even experimenting with non-market economies (such as gift economies). This paragraph may be excused as geeky or irrelevant to the present day situation, though, but I'm interested in experimenting with these things.

I know much of the above consists of "thinking", "guessing", "figure" and similar hypothesizing. I also know that I won't be spending $11 on a PDF anytime soon (with a few possible exceptions).