Dan Ariely makes a baffling argument that ebooks should somehow cost even more than physical books, and that it's "puzzling" how much attention people pay to price.<p>It's hardly surprising that consumers would respond to what they see as unfair pricing models in whatever method is available to them.<p>When the easiest and most available method of feedback is through a star rating system, naturally people will use that for anything they feel the need to say, even if that's about the price rather than the content of the book.<p>Rather than moaning about people's desire to see a discount when they're getting a product that's cheaper to produce, Ariely should consider solutions to the issue he raises.<p>If you don't like people talking about the "wrong" thing in a review, perhaps the answer is to make it easier for them to talk about those things somewhere else. How about a "why I'm not buying this" box? As a onetime publisher myself, I would have loved to know WHY people didn't buy, not just the fact that they didn't.
Absolute, complete utter bullshit. Functionality be damned--- such a pricing structure makes it impossible for people to get beyond the initial rip-off. Nor should they; this is the same approach that gave us 20.00 CDs with a single desired track, year after year after year. The single star review is the equivalent of the pitchfork and torch, perhaps it is time the publishers looked out the castle window!
The most annoying thing is that Kindle books often have mistakes because of misses in the conversion (OCR). I don't think I have a single Kindle book that doesn't have at least a 3-4 typos (1's for I)...and there's always one that tends to really throw me off for a second.<p>It really annoys me to pay more and have additional mistakes in my book.
The article makes two contradictory points. First that the standard view that the utility of a product should determine the price is confounded by real-world human factors and second that consumers should ignore real-world human factors and accept prices based on utility. Seems to me that since economics attempts to model the transactions and interactions of humans engaged in various types of commerce that trying to change the subject being studied so the models work better is a little misguided.
It is strange. The part of a book that costs money is paying someone to come up with and type in the words. Printing it is cheap. Sending you an e-book is cheap. Those cost nothing compared to the labor that goes into making a good book.<p>Therefore, to me, it makes sense that a book would be $15 regardless of whether I get a dead tree in the mail or not. (This assumes that there is no DRM on the e-book. If I can't lend the book or share it with friends, then the e-book is not as good as the real book.)
I'm not sure what Dan's point is. Customers know that digital versions cost publishers much less money. Pricing them higher is obviously going to make users feel disrespected and think "greed indeed", as a review stated.<p>And maybe it's because Dan and I are using different definitions of rationality, but I also don't see how the 1-star reviews are irrational. I think fairness is a big part of rationality, and the thought that "as readers we should pay a little less attention to minor differences in price" is shockingly short-sighted. Behind the 1-star reviews is a deep-seated and <i>completely rational</i> worry that if the higher pricing works, in the long term, sellers will be encouraged to bump prices up even more.<p>Edit: There are comments to the blog post about how the pricing makes sense from a "traditional economics" viewpoint. I don't know much about it, but if traditional economics doesn't take humanness (respect, fairness) into account then it's just a failure on the subject's part.