From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Sun Jul 23 2000 - 16:32:21 MDT
virtual-earth@virtual-earth.com wrote:
> The promise of electronic publishing is those things it can do
> that print can't do:
...
> 2. give readers the opportunity to buy by the story, the page,
> the sentence, the byte
Umm...and if readers constantly refuse to have anything to do with the
smaller choices? (Witness repeated failures of micropayment systems,
induced at least in part because customers did not like the added stress
of having the decision to read the next page or whatever be an economic
decision, as opposed to something they could not get in monetary trouble
for if they let themselves do again and again.)
> Electronic publishing doesn't have to deal with returns; that alone
> should cut their prices by a third to a half.
Actually, some of them (like the ones I work with) do have to deal with
returns - insofar as they have to refund the purchase. They don't have
to deal with restocking, which does cut their costs a bit, but the
time of a serviceperson to enter the return and the fees the credit
card companies charge for excessive returns (which, in their eyes,
indicate fradulent transactions) covers more than half the cost of a
return. (And servicing returns would seem to account for far less than
third of a book's price, so even if there were no returns, that wouldn't
come anywhere near cutting costs by a third, to say nothing of a full
half.)
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