Would you pay $8.99 for something that is free?

There sure is something rotten in the publishing industry when it comes to acceptance for new technology. To take an example, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is available at $5.23 from Amazon.com. Now, you would think that it should be cheaper to get e-books than print books – but sadly that’s not often the case. At Fictionwise.com, one of the big e-book vendors, the price for Brave New World is $8.99 which is quite a lot more than the cost for the actual book at Amazon.com. But if you’re buying it as an e-book, there are no printing costs, the delivery and storage costs should be close to zero and there is not the risk that some books will go unsold.

This comes down to publishers’ reluctance to the digital medium, but I won’t discuss that here (if you want sources on that, check the links in my second last post). Anyway, the strangest thing in this equation is that the very same book, Brave New World, is actually available here for free, in clean, pure text. I would guess that the work is considered to be in the public domain. So, how can you be charged $8.99 for something that is free? Please use the link if you want to read the work, and don’t spoil money on publishers and greedy vendors. In due time, the publishing industry will go the same way as the recording industries.