Given a choice between $0 and ~$12, it seems that many will choose $0. Even though that's illegal, hurts the author, and reduces the chances of future work from them.

The experiment described in TFA is pretty clearcut. She saturated the torrents with fakes, and more people bought authorized copies.

But another experiment would be more interesting. Cut the price of the ebook substantially, and look at aggregate sales. After all, the marginal cost of ebooks is ~$0. And downloading torrents is more hassle (and more risky) than buying from Amazon or whatever. Maybe there's a price point that would minimize piracy and maximize sales.

It was a near perfect experiment. She raised the price from $0 vs $12 to $0-plus-time-spent-finding-real-copy vs $12 and instantly saw the supply/demand curve move as it should.

We should absolutely expect any move off the $12 to cause a similar response. There is almost certainly a maximized price/units point on that curve somewhere below the $12... King's to the publisher brave enough to look for it first.

(It should be noted that its not just $12 right now either, its $12-plus-the-hassle-the-DRM-puts-you-thru).

Right. And it's also worth noting her comment that those increased sales helped her sell another series to the publisher.

And for what it's worth, this is basically how the music industry beat piracy.

The music industry "beat" piracy by providing a better, more convenient experience at a low monthly fee.

The publishing industry hasn't come close to this. In fact, they're most well-known for an illegal price fixing scheme.[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/apple-450...

Sorry to be unclear. I meant just that.

I'm not sure this is accurate - I used to download music and can count on one hand how many times I procured a deliberately bad file. Spotify represents a reasonably priced and convenient service that has the music I want.

I did recently bin my Spotify subscription owing to privacy concerns but have returned - it's a pain to build up a library and then put it somewhere accessible (sometimes offline in an era of devices that aren't as big as the iPod I used to have) and I was optimistic to think that the value-add would be trivially replicatable. The weekly playlists are excellent too, so currently I'm prepared to pay a monthly convenience fee. If that changed too dramatically, I'd probably move back to piracy.

Netflix is a good example of faltering here where Spotify succeeded - I know 99% of the time that the media I want to watch isn't available on their platform whereas that's an almost non-event with the latter. Convenience is something people will almost always pay for.

Yeah, I was unclear. I was referring to lowering prices, not introducing bad copies.

I'm not trying to debate whether an ebook or a physical book is better or worse and I feel like most in this thread have willfully misinterpreted that. My point was that if you consider just the cost of a good, you are likely to run into "how can this possibly be fair" scenarios. But cost isn't the only thing that factors into price, whether you like the good or not.

Ebooks and physical books have different uses, different distribution, different benefits, different downsides. They aren't identical and it's not surprising or unfair that they're priced differently.

I understand how the "value argument" influences the initial price of a good, but once it is out in the market demand should be taken into account. If a product's supply is (practically) infinite and its demand is low, then the price should be low. Anything else smacks of poor business decision making or price fixing.

I think what you're failing to understand that as consumers we decide what is fair to factor into price.

Exactly. I can buy the ebook for $12 or for $10 I can buy the physical book, convince myself I've done right by the author, and download the ebook for free if I need it.