[p2p-research] lightfoot book sharing ?

[Kevin Carson]

On 1/13/10, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> If photocopying is a lot cheaper then this is sure to have a big impact.
> It's rather strange that it's so much cheaper in Thailand, I wonder if this
> is typical of the South - maybe Northern photocopy sellers are making huge
> markups on cost, or paying some kind of photocopy rent?  Companies seem to
> scam horribly on printer ink as well, which also impacts how far people can
> rely on online copies (as I've said before, only a minority seem ready to
> read long pieces on-screen).  For poor students, reading on screen without
> paper might be even cheaper than copying, provided they have computers which
> would have to be a big "if".

Copy shops are certainly expensive in the U.S.  Even in Fayetteville,
AR, a college town of close to 100,000, the only prominent copy shop
is a single FedEx-Kinkos.  Not only are the per-copy prices very bad,
but their computer stations offer poor-quality software.  No Firefox,
no Open Office.  Just the standard vanilla-flavored crap from Redmond,
all around.

This tells me there's not much competition.  I wonder just what the
capital outlays and other entry barriers are to setting up an
independent copy shop, and what kinds of government regulations raise
the cost.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html