I've only been in a mall twice in the last 5 years.
However, point taken. The issue I have with DRM however, is fundamentally different. When someone steals a piece of tangible merchandise, the store is out because they actually borrowed money to purchase that merchandise up front, and has to eat the cost. There is no rational argument that can setup an equivalent with digital media. Additionally, There is absolutely no reason any ebook should cost more than $10 when the hardcover is available for $16-$20. Yes there is overhead in providing these items for download, but much of that overhead is directly tied to keep people from stealing it. Neat, so take $3 off the price of your ebook and more people will be willing to buy it.
Book publishers make enough money off the title to produce _Freedom: A Novel_ by John Franzen in hardcover at $15.
By your logic, they have no business charging $75 for Harris' _Trading and Exchanges_ (a bible of market microstructure); Harris' book has a comparable number of pages and the same binding.
You are essentially advocating for fiat pricing, and against the market. You can make a consistent argument based on that, but it will wildly mismatch the way pretty much all of western civilization works.
I should clarify: I don't mean to say I want pricing to be flat by any means, even if my original post implied it. What I meant to say is that the ebook is not cheaper than the paperback or the hardcover.
Example: Cryptonomicon is $8.99 as a softcover, but, the ebook version is $10.99
The notion that things on computers are less "real" than things in the real world is one of my pet moral crusades; probably not surprising given my background. With that in mind: I don't start from the premise that ebooks should cost less than paper books.
In particular, ebook versions of reference works are more valuable in electronic form.
I start from the premise that eBooks should cost less, because you get less. No right to lend, no right to sell, no way to insure against loss or theft, no guarantee you can even read it a couple of years down the road if the platform fails in the market. In effect, you "buy" something but never actually own it. You'd have to drop the price pretty low to interest me under these circumstances.
(I've picked up a few $5 O'Reilly titles on the App Store, but probably wouldn't even have done that if they weren't basically DRM-free ePubs with a reader wrapped around them.)
I value my electronic copy of _Infinite Jest_ more highly than my physical copy:
* The physical copy is run ragged because you have to flip from the front to the back of the book constantly
* In the electronic copy, if I tap the word catastatic in the text, I'm immediately presented with the definition. In the paper copy, it's just annoying enough to look that up that I'm inclined to try to derive the meaning from context, which is a trap DFW seems inclined to spring mercilessly.
* Similarly, in the electronic version, and anyone who has read IJ will see immediately the value of this, when I tap a footnote number, I'm immediately taken to the text of the footnote, and I can instantly return back to the text. This speeds up my reading time of the book significantly.
Do these factors matter to you? Of course they don't. I'm a dork and I'm just namedropping a prestige book to make a point in the most puffy way possible. But: I value these features a lot more than "right to lend", "right to sell", "insurance against loss", etc.
And in a free market, I'm allowed to do that. And, though this is a stretch and you won't be happy to hear me claim this, I think I'm closer to the opinion of the bulk of the market than you are.
The marginal cost is a lot less for an ebook, though. Sure, the sunk costs are the same (actually writing the book), but the costs to produce, distribute and store the book are significantly less, so I'd expect a discount of a few dollars. And yes, also because I'm foregoing the ability to lend it out or resell it. Oh, also the technology is still pretty new, so I still don't think you're getting the same experience as with a copy of one of Knuth's books, or another well-made hardback.
"Additionally, There is absolutely no reason any ebook should cost more than $10 when the hardcover is available for $16-$20."
The price is what the market will bear, period.
As to manufacturing costs, the cost of producing a hardcover book and a mass-market paperback are negligible, the prices of those editions are not set based on cost of production but on time of availability.
Book pricing is fundamentally broken right now. And the vast majority of authors do not make a reasonable income from their work. Books are priced as commodities, the same as you might see prices for fruit or vegetables in the supermarket. The way that authors make the most money is by milking high demand for their books from the early buyers through hardcover sales. This is why the hardcover comes out first at a higher price, because there's a lot more profit built into the earliest release. But readers would find it unfair if the paperback edition came out first and cost 2x as much as normal paperbacks for the first several months. The perception of value of hardbacks offsets this feeling, even though the price of hardback editions usually falls down to only a few dollars more than the paperback after a while. Much the same as 1st class / coach class on airplanes, the higher paying customers help subsidize the lower paying customers.
However, there is no hardback/paperback differentiator in eBooks. If the eBook price is lowered a few dollars relative to the paperback and eBooks become the dominant form of book then authors and publishers are faced with a crisis, the inability to make a profit on books. Keeping eBook prices close to paperback books helps solve the problem somewhat because the lower cost of production allows for a higher profit margin, though not as high as for hardbacks.
Ultimately, it's not the wad of pressed wood pulp that readers value, per se, but the content itself, so there is a reasonable justification that the paperback price should be the price floor for any edition of the book, regardless of media. So far this seems to have held, as today's eBook pricing still results in very lively sales.
It remains to be seen what the ultimate answer is to this crisis, but it's important to recognize the seriousness of it.
However, point taken. The issue I have with DRM however, is fundamentally different. When someone steals a piece of tangible merchandise, the store is out because they actually borrowed money to purchase that merchandise up front, and has to eat the cost. There is no rational argument that can setup an equivalent with digital media. Additionally, There is absolutely no reason any ebook should cost more than $10 when the hardcover is available for $16-$20. Yes there is overhead in providing these items for download, but much of that overhead is directly tied to keep people from stealing it. Neat, so take $3 off the price of your ebook and more people will be willing to buy it.