[xtho]

> “Books are priced too high”

I don't think he (the "pirat") has an idea of how much time has to be invested in the production of good books. I personally think that books are drastically undervalued and that people are not willing to pay enough for good books which has the consequence that they are either served well targeted bestsellers, which can be produced at that price, or junk. Big publishing companies and bestseller authors don't have that much of a problem selling their books at a lower price so that people are less inclined to download a pirated book.

[relix]

I don't think he means books in general, but ebooks, as compared to paperbacks/hardbacks.

I recently bought a Kindle, and every ebook in the Amazon store, without exception, is more expensive than the cheapest paperback version available at Amazon.

That's just ridiculous, and no matter how "close to zero" any marginal costs of a printed book might be - and I'd like some proof of that, because I find it hard to believe that handling, shipping, storage, printing, testprinting, typesetting, missed shipments etc, are so cheap - an ebook should never be more expensive than the same physical paperback.

[ronnoch]

Yeah, that's one quote I just can't agree with. The amount of value I get out of a good book always hugely exceeds what I paid for it.

[modeless]

The App Store has proven that most software is overpriced. If there was a book store with $.99 and $1.99 books, I think we would discover something very similar.

[cosmicray]

The question could be argued about if software was overpriced, or were there too many layers in the distribution chain that all wanted to make something off the software sale. The iTunes App store has collapsed the distribution chain. The OS X App store may do the same.