[RheingoldRiver]

No, the price of ebooks is insane and getting worse. Libraries are somewhat of a captive market for publishers and they set insane costs & limit the number of times an ebook can be checked out before the library has to buy it again. IMO the cost of electronic materials to libraries is one of the biggest issues in our society that no one talks or knows about.

[ajsnigrutin]

I never understood the overpricing of ebooks...

A price of a book is a price of the "data" inside (copyright) + price of paper, printing, binding, packing material and distribution

A price of an ebook is a price od the "data" inside (copyright) and the price of cheaper digital distributon.

So, you save on paper, boxes, trucks, you often also save on retailers (if you sell directly), and you want more money for that? No paper for me, and you also take resale options away.. and for more money?

Just the resaleability is a scam... if you bought it, you own it. If buying isn't owning (including reselling, reading on any device, etc.), then piracy isn't stealing.

I'm sure government regulation could solve both problems, but they're more interested in screwing the "normal people" instead.

[ForHackernews]

What's there to understand? It's capitalism 101. Producers will charge the maximum the market will bear.

[ajsnigrutin]

Sure, but who the hell buys a digital copy they can't even resell for more money than a physical copy?

[RheingoldRiver]

I usually prefer digital books for a lot of reasons, they're convenient to bring with me places & I can change my mind about what I will read; I don't get wrist pain from holding the book open; I can read in the dark with just the ereader's backlight on; I have control over font & font size, so I don't have to get used to differences every book I read; there's no chance of papercuts; you can use ctrl+F.

The downsides of ebooks are that I can't write in margins (if it's nonfiction, I would never write in a fiction book), and the ereader chassis conducts heat better than paper so it's extremely cold at first in the winter. Also footnotes are annoying as shit compared to footnotes in paper media, and tabbing back to a known earlier page (e.g. a map for fantasy novels) is worse UX than in a physical book.

Cost aside, ebooks win almost always, although sometimes I'll buy a nice edition of a book I love to decorate my bookshelf, and when I read paper books I enjoy the things they're better at than ebooks.

(And of course there's audiobooks, where physical media makes little sense)

[maximus-decimus]

I don't want to have to deal with reselling books... Plus I'm a hoarder so I really don't want to tempt fate and accumulate physical things I don't need.

[medstrom]

Yep. Basically, people value ebooks higher.

[mathgeek]

Sadly this is true for me. Much as I wish ebooks had the freedoms that come with paper, I value reduced physical clutter more than the ability to share and resell.