http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/s ... ding-theft

In terms of books the prices are often laughable, and full albums aren't much better short of a sale. When you can get a physical copy of your chosen media delivered to your door for £1-2 more, something's amiss.

I suspect it's partly because the cost of the physical media is actually only a ver small portion of the purchase cost. In the case of music you have recording, production and marketing costs plus other sundries that contribute but the cost of the CDs and casings is pennies if you're pressing enough. That being true, the 'total cost of production' difference between physical and digital media might not be all that much. Of course once sales have made good on all those initial costs, the digital option does make more profit as the 'media production' costs go away while they remain on physical media. But again, it takes big economies of scale for that to matter.

None of which changes the fact downloading something illegally is taking money away from the people who made it, as small as that amount of money may be. It'll never be nothing. If you like music or films or books, you should pay for them.

Interestingly downloaders are also big buyers. I do prefer the physical media as well, I will get around to re-ripping my CD collection into higher quality loss less format, which is something you cannot do with downloads.

Considering the average household only has 150 books I wonder how many illegal downloads of books there really are?

I wouldn't mind paying full paperback prices for ebooks...... If they weren't locked to a particular system (eg Kindle apps or iBook etc).

Most of the eBooks I buy are under a tenner. I don't known how expensive they are in the uk, but over here they seem to come out at hard back prices (15- 20€) and then come down to around 8€ after a couple of months. There are very few books we are so desperate to read, that we pay full price.

I also keep a look out for bargains, and with Prime membership, we get to borrow a book a month.


If 150 is the average, there must be a lot of households without any books! We have around 70 books on the Kindles and nearly 1000 normal books.

What do you think of Amazon Prime? I am considering it In a year or so.


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If you are a heavy reader, it is great. But you really need to order a lot of stuff on Amazon to make it worthwhile - here you get free next day delivery, which is a huge saving over a year if you regularly order stuff. The lending of books is a great bonus.

Agree and Amazon cannot take away all my books if they have either miss sold it (as the did) or if they make a mistake as they did for someone in Scandinavia

I do order quite a bit but am cutting back for a year or so. It might be worth considering in future. Thanks for that.