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Comment by cmars232 | Hacker News Reader

Ebooks may be more useful, but they are also much more ephemeral and fragile than a physical copy. They are subject to accidental deletion, file corruption and future obsolescence due to closed formats, DRM and technological innovation over time.

Those bits you paid for, they are rotting. The flash memory that stores them is leaking electrons and decaying. 5-10 years from now, your purchase may well evaporate into entropy unless you take great pains to move it from media to media. That is, if this is even allowed by your locked-down hardware.

How is something so ephemeral actually worth more than a physical artifact?

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For you, maybe they're not! Me, I value bits more than the artifacts that carry them. My MP3s are worth far more to me than the CDs I ripped them from; the CDs invariably got scratched or lost, and I was lugging around huge books full of them. Once iTMS came around, I virtually stopped buying them altogether.

I'm not going to argue that there aren't people who value archival formats. There clearly are.

However, it's not the job of a pricing scheme to ensure that everyone buys your product. Almost the sole job of a pricing scheme is to maximize the revenue stream commanded by the product. Literally the first step in designing a pricing scheme is to study the market, segment it by perceived value, and then price the product to attract the largest (Buyer x Price).

So, I humbly suggest: irrational attachment to physical objects as carriers of bits aside, for most people (not you, but most), the value of pure digital forms dwarfs the archival value of ink.

But irrational attachment to physical objects is a major factor in book pricing right now. Putting that aside because it favours your argument is like setting aside irrational attachment to designer labels when discussing the price of clothing.

I'm happy if we're on the same page about book price anchoring being irrational, regardless of what each of us think the implications are.

Ebooks may be more useful, but they are also much more ephemeral and fragile than a physical copy.

I just convert the ones I want to keep to ePub and put them into Dropbox. Then they are backed up and instantly available to all my machines as well as being backed up by my computer's normal backup mechanism.

In point of fact, all of the book stores mentioned in the article (and iBookstore, unmentioned) allow you redownload your purchases easily.

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