Are Ebooks Overpriced?
Who ever thought that one day books would not be written. People no longer have to go to stores and buy books anymore, they can read them online by authors who instead of paying the extra money to get published, simply put their book in a virtual form. No costs involving materials, dealers, book stores, or advertisement. It can all simply be done on the computer.
But is this new revolution of the press good for the consumer? I went browsing through some Ebooks the other day, ranging in titles from "How to tame your dog" to "What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense." They were also ranging in price from about 5 cents to almost $100. What do we get out of these high priced books? First off, I can tell you what we as consumers do not get. We do not get a tangible item (unless of course you print the pages, get a good old fashioned stapler, and try to put one through about 200 pages of computer paper), we do not get the experience of sitting down in a quiet place in a comfy chair (note: my chair has four legs, a back, and a seat that are all made out of wood as soft as a park bench), and we do not get to return our item after our purchase. We instead are either given the link to a .pdf file or actually sent a .pdf file (I like how the later makes you think that you actually "own" the item).
Do we really want to pay upwards of $20 to get something that can be wiped out with the crash of our computer? I say buy the book and print it, or better yet, go to the store and buy a real book, just like we've been doing for the last few hundred years.