If you kill the business incentive for authors, only rich people and relentless blowhards will write.

Not sure if reference to subject of post or reference to number of your comments therein.

Publishers aren’t made of money.

They sure as hell aren’t made of fairy wings and unicorn farts. The job of the publisher is to get the material from the author to the public. If the dubious “job” of making money supersedes the primary function, they’ve failed.

The real people to worry about are the libraries themselves. They’re the dying industry. They make their money by sending the tax man out to collect it by force. Then they buy whatever they feel like. Their pension costs are huge and the combination of a Kindle and Google are 1000 times better than any bricks and mortar library. So how long will taxpayers cough up the cash for this nostalgia?

I think tripling the price is a pretty good attempt at a compromise. They recognize the value of libraries but also price the books to try to make the whole enterprise sustainable.

That’s why waiting times are sky rocketing at Netflix.

If the libraries don’t pay and the reader doesn’t pay, then the money disappears from the system.

And that is why I won’t buy their lovely products. Fuck me? No. Fuck you!

Then computer software came along.  By this time, the idea of the commons and public good had become kind of quaint, beaten down by the unity of business and government.  The software companies convinced lawmakers that software was different from books, music, and video.  You could own the disk the software came on, but it was perfectly OK for the programmers to sell you only the right to use the software – revokable at any time for any reason. 

Thus it is that I have shelves full of books, LPs, CDs, video tapes, and DVDs.  I can read, listen to, or watch them when I want.  I can lend them to my friends or sell them to strangers.  I can trade them for other books, LPs, CDs, tapes, or DVDs.  They are mine.  But every day I use a computer program that I don’t, and can’t, own.  Once a month I have to call a support person and get a new code number to reauthorize “my” program for another month’s use.

This is what big media wants for books, music, and video, too.  Out ability to own those things sticks in their craw.  But now that they’re turning books, music, and video into software, they can change all that. 

The E in E-books stands for “ephemeral.”  Since government is clearly not going to help us, there is only one way to fix this.  Until publishers extend to us – and libraries – the ownership rights that we have with printed books, don’t buy them and don’t read them.  Not even at the library.

“Examples of the new pricing include: “Breaking Dawn” by Stephenie Meyer will increase from $22.99 to $34.99; “4th of July” by James Patterson will go from $13.99  to $20.99; and David Sedaris’ “Me Talk Pretty One Day” will go from $14.99 to $37.99.”
http://overdriveblogs.com/library/2012/09/14/hachette-book-group%E2%80%99s-new-library-ebook-pricing/

And this will mean fewer books in libraries, meaning fewer people will see them, like them, and purchase them.

Me Talk Pretty One Day is available in paperback on Amazon for $10.87 with prices going as low as $5. 
It is available for kindle for $9.99.

Unlimited borrowing seems nice, but gouging libraries seems stupid.

RedBox can buy a DVD and rent the hell out of it without paying an extra fee, why are ebooks different?

Or is this another way to make up the imaginary losses from people cracking their DRM?  Punish the people who would pay them to teach those dirty dirty pirates a lesson.  Like 5 minutes of unskippable ads on a plastic disc telling you not to steal the object you legally purchased.

Major Publishers are terrified of not getting every penny they used to and people seeing the book without them getting a cut.  Its sort of like how the Music and Movie industries declared war on consumers… and that isn’t going very well.

A new policy allowing more would be  acceptable.

http://paidcontent.org/2012/09/14/hachette-to-raise-ebook-prices-for-libraries-by-220/

There you would find Hatchette’s reasoning:
“We believe these terms fairly reflect the value to the library customer, that the ebooks will not need periodic replacement as do print copies, and there is no limit on amount of borrowing activity per ebook copy,” Hachette VP, communications Sophie Cottrell told me.

Interesting, especially considering if you keep reading you will find that half the major publishers don’t even offer e-books to libraries. 

But, yeah, go get the pitchforks.

What I mean to say is, Hachette’s policies are pretty shitty across the board.  I’m even more disgusted with them having read this.