I live in the US now. I don't have cable TV but I do pay for Netflix and HBO Now and will probably pay for the ad-free Hulu Plus now that it exists (I'd never pay for an ad-supported streaming service) and, what the hell, probably Showtime too. In part because I watch them but I don't really need all of them. I really want to put my money where my mouth is here and support such services.
I often now see novels on Amazon where the paperback is $8 for a book that's been out for years. The ebook is... $10.
Now in the case of print media like the NY Times and the WSJ, I get why they prefer the physical copy: it comes down to advertising. Advertisers will still pay more for print ads and certain advertisers will only buy print ads so they have to print physical copies a bunch of people won't read. It's why, just now in going to this page, you see the WSJ advertising print + online access and why print + online is usually cheaper than just online.
But I don't get this at all with ebooks. Paper books need to be typeset and printed, supplies for that bought and the physical products need to be boxed and shipped to various distributors and so on. The distributor, printer and retailer all need to take cuts.
The ebook is essentially direct to market with zero distribution costs.
Now ebooks offer a lot of advantages to the consumer: immediate access, searchability, more portable. But they also come with negatives: you can't as a general rule resell or even give away an ebook so it can only generally be read by the buyer and their immediate family.
Publishers should be loving this because publishers hate the preowned book market. It's why textbooks are often changed from year to year: just to devalue used previous editions and force students to buy new books.
Yet publishers are acting in a way that strongly suggests they just want to kill the ebook market. Could that be it? They just know how to print and sell paper books and want to keep on doing it? Could it be fear of piracy and the inability to adapt to this new business model?
My own sense of fairness kicks in here: when I see a $10 ebook for an $8 paper book I just don't buy either.
I'm reminded here of the cable TV industry. Cable TV is dying. It's why cable companies will essentially give you free Internet if you subscribe to TV services (and charge you $50-80/month if you don't). This artificially props up the number of TV subscribers, which is important because the price of content is driven by the number of consumers. The more consumers a provider has, the lower the pre-consumer cost of channels. This is also why Comcast was so desperate to merge with TWC and has since merged with Dish: to reduce content costs and increase their negotiating power with content providers.
But all of this is just seeking higher land in a flood: eventually you run out of land anyway so you're just delaying the inevitable.
We see the same thing in the music, TV and movie industries where direct-to-market versions are often more expensive than, say, buying a CD or DVD and having it shipped to your house.
Perhaps this really is the long game of setting price expectations.
Piracy seems to be the response of the market to "unfair" pricing and licensing practices and it does seem to eventually force change. The problem is that once you've taught a whole market to be pirates, only some of them will switch back to more legitimate channels.
It still astounds me that you can be forced to watch FBI disclaimers and the like on movies you legitimately buy and have incompatibilities that won't allow you to watch HD content (HDCP versions and the like) yet what has none of those problems is pirated content. It's a wholly better user experience.
I really wish these old world industries would just accept we live in a digital world and get over their anachronistic business models.
[1]: http://www.itnews.com.au/news/day-13-iinet-ceo-says-bittorre...