News flash: wood pulp and printers are cheap—the cost of a physical book block is around 10% of the retail price of a book. 90% of the costs are in writing, editing, typesetting, proofreading—exactly the same whether the book is a PDF or a lump of paper.
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Replying to @cstross @pookleblinky
so you're pretending you don't know the difference between a one time cost (writing and editing it) and the costs of reproducing and distributing physical duplicates?
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It's a compensation model meant to spread the payment for that one time cost among the many people who benefit from it Allowing unrestricted access creates a free rider problem where those one time costs never get paid and the product never comes into existence
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Space__Horse and
Having been on the other side of the debate, in hindsight it's very tiresome pretending not to know how this works for the one thing you care about even though it's applies in many, many situations It's the whole "Why do my taxes pay for a road I don't drive on" thing
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Space__Horse and
People love to suggest that musicians stop charging money for records and instead make their money from live shows but by this logic they can't charge for live shows either After all, the cost of a show doesn't change based on how many people are physically in the audience
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Space__Horse and
The cost of having the show is already sunk, right, now that they're already performing why shouldn't I be allowed to just sneak in to watch for free, it doesn't take anything from them materially
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Space__Horse and
The big difference here is that musicians benefit directly from the show, whereas record companies (and book publishers) gobble up the vast majority of the profits from a record (or book). Shows are also easy to gatekeep. It's easily possible to prevent people from gatecrashing.
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Replying to @WenSchw @arthur_affect and
It's entirely possible to limit the number of people who go to a show, it's not easy to sneak in. It's not possible to prevent people from downloading a PDF of a book or an MP3 of a record. This is why you change your business model instead of futilely trying to stop this.
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Replying to @WenSchw @arthur_affect and
Book publishers generally charge far less for an e-book than the physical copy, record companies put music for "free" on YouTube and Spotify. They found that video game piracy dropped to very low levels when video games started being sold online for cheaper than physical copies.
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Replying to @WenSchw @arthur_affect and
Do they? I mostly buy children's books at the moment, and I don't find them to be any cheaper. Nor were the science fiction novels I've bought recently much cheaper. They were mostly about $15.
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This talking point is obsolete, AAA publishers on Steam sell their tentpoles (like the recent Doom Eternal release) for $60 all the time
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