Craig Rath wrote:
I was going to say that you don't see people making copies of books because it isn't cost effective to do so, but I guess billashline@netscape.net proved me wrong. Then again, his example assumes that a few bucks is better than full price, when you can get books at greatly discounted prices every day legitimately, and without the hassles of printing your own copy.
I'll assume you've never worked in the book business and don't know about how the industry determines pricing. It's arbitrary. And it's consistent no matter where the book is being sold. Everything is pretty wide open on pricing in the states, but go abroad and you find a different regime. Where I live, books are usually low priced if they are published locally. Routledge doesn't cut its prices to the local price schedule when they stock the shelves at the downtown bookstores. Their rep imposes the same price structure as in the states. And in the states, the cost of academic trade size paper back books is now about 30 bucks. So you can pretty well tell what's going to happen. In an industry where publishers determine prices based on how much they can get for something rather than how much something is "worth", people are going to find ways to get copies. It's cheap to do here. In places like Thailand, people make a living off illegal copies of music. Nothing you would find discussed on this list, but major label stuff. Again, the record business makes no allowances for what people can afford to pay. Tower Records in Bangkok sells CDs for the same prices as the US. The Tower Records that used to be in Seoul was more expensive than the US. But Seoul is economically comparable to the US. Bangkok is not. In any case, the price of CDs was supposed to come down years ago. It never did. Now it will have to go up so that record companies can make up what they're losing on MP3 files. Too bad. Shortsided industry could have made some efforts to circumvent the activity and let their greed get in the way. Well now, John Q Public responds in kind and let's his greed get in the way. I already buy too many CDs. I don't make copies of other peoples' music for me because I'd rather have the original release. But I'll continue to make copies for others and have no moral qualms in doing so. There's so much else to have moral qualms about, why bother with this minor issue. Creativity is something no one can own. No one is an originary artist anymore. He always owes a debt to his precursors. He always learned from his teachers. All music produced is always already a theft of what came before. The same for all writing. All you can do is be consistent. If you steal or have stolen, then don't complain when others do it to you. But it's cool when people like Eskelin and Cuneiform ask people not to copy. I won't out of respect to their request, accept only to upload to my IPod for easy carriage. Bests