People selling something in general are not getting paid for their "contribution", they are getting paid because (a) they have something you want, (b) they ask for money to give it. They are getting paid for the ownership.

If I sell a plot of land I inherited from N generations ago, there was zero of my "contribution" factored in into the price (and perhaps zero of my ancestors who first got it contribution. Such plots might have just been up for grabs at the time). The price can still be millions for said plot of land -- it's all to demand, nothing to do with some compensation for "contribution".

In this case, the publishers (and owners of the story copyright) want to sell the 2 different versions separately.

It's as simple as that.

And you can complain about "useless middlemen, etc" but it could just as well have been the author that wanted to sell his stories as different deals for different mediums, and not e.g. allow automatic conversion from one format to another.

Usually, he who sells something sets the price for what you get (and determines what you get).

You might agree and buy it or not, but you don't get to force them otherwise, because you "really wanted X", or "you thought you got Y too", etc.

You're taking an example from the world of rivalrous goods and trying to apply it to the world of non-rivalrous goods (where supply is no longer a factor).

You then try to reframe copyright, from "Copyright is forcing consumers to overpay for some things" into (paraphrasing) "Anyone complaining about the current state of copyright law[1] is trying to force artists and publishers to live in poverty."

[1] Which is mostly the result of a century's worth of lobbying by IP holders with little to no effective counter-lobbying by consumers.

>You're taking an example from the world of rivalrous goods and trying to apply it to the world of non-rivalrous goods (where supply is no longer a factor).

Read demand as "people wanting the stuff" as opposed to "people wanting the stuff versus available stuff". I'm not talking about the law of supply and demand, but of, let's say, "willingness to pay to get the thing if no other way is available" (even if it's just for legal reasons that no other way is available).

>You then try to reframe copyright, from "Copyright is forcing consumers to overpay for some things" into (paraphrasing) "Anyone complaining about the current state of copyright law[1] is trying to force artists and publishers to live in poverty."

Nope. In fact I wouldn't care if some artists and publishers lived in poverty.

What I argue (and this is not about personal preference) is that the transaction is:

(a) publisher has something another person wants, sets price

(b) said person can buy it or not

We can imagine a setup that's just based on somebody owning the sole ability to sell a thing and its digital copies, and demanding whatever for it.

Scarcity, marginal cost of copy, etc, don't need to come into play.

People who is only authorized to sell gets to set whatever terms, even if those terms are "I want people to pay twice if they want the text version and the audio version" or even crazier.

That's the reality (and, more or less, the law).

We could make it like "Everybody is authorized to make as many digital copies as they want, for free, redistribute them, even put their names on the work" if we wanted.

It's not something set in stone, it's only set in the interests of publishers and in law. And while we can argue that the interests of creators are not the same, most creators tend to just sell their rights to/go along with the publishers, so the point is moot from a legal perspective.

>Which is mostly the result of a century's worth of lobbying by IP holders with little to no effective counter-lobbying by consumers.

Well, in life people don't get what the want/need/deserve. They get what they've managed to negotiate.

If consumers don't counter-lobby/protest/break some heads they'll get the laws ip-holders want.

> If consumers don't counter-lobby/protest/break some heads they'll get the laws ip-holders want.

If IP holders get too greedy, consumers will just pirate stuff. I mean, consider the situation for music vs films. Music is available at low cost through streaming services, and piracy is no longer a major issue. But piracy remains a serious issue for films, which are still priced way too high.

But I suppose that piracy is a form of protest, so hey.

Try starting from the author. The author invested his own time and wrote a thing, but for whatever reason didn't want to go out and sell it himself. So he sold a company the rights to print and sell text copies of the thing he'd written. He then sold the rights to sell audio books of his work to a different company (and perhaps the right to make TV show of his book to a third company).

The only reason a company was willing to pay for the rights to the text copy of the work was because they where being guaranteed some sort of monopoly. If that monopoly is weakened then they have less incentives to pay the author.

If that is a good or bad outcome is left as an exercise to the reader.

Do you think that's how it works in practice, any evidence?

I suspect the authors now are getting the same, or less, and the publishers are both charging more for digital (despite their costs being lower) and taking a higher proportion.

>the publishers are both charging more for digital (despite their costs being lower)

The costs associated with printing and distributing a physical book are a much smaller slice of the pie than a lot of people assume. (Back when I looked into this, it was about $2.50 per copy for a hardback as I recall. The author cost for a PoD trade paperback from Amazon is about $5.)

Also, in general, the end-user price for books is generally significantly lower than it used to be. Go back a couple decades and you mostly paid list price for books and paperbacks usually weren't available for a year or so after a book came out in hardcover.