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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheAlkaizer" data-source="post: 9648957" data-attributes="member: 7024893">Morrus is right that it's a balance between what makes sense for the publishers and the buyer.For reasons that are hard to explain, I would never pay 60$ for a PDF. I do it all the time with books, even if they have the same content. It's not entirely logical, I think it really stems that it feels like the PDF is nothing. It's something I can copy, I can delete.But one place where I disagree is the need to educate the customers. You can explain everything that you want, I'll never pay 60$ for a PDF. You can try to explain to someone that the 30$ they pay for a burger at the restaurant is also paying for the building, the wages, the ingredients, the experience, cleaning the facility and every other expenses encountered by the business, I'm still not paying 30$ for a burger. Understanding the economics often has very little effect on customers behaviors.I also find that publishers tend to hold two opposite discourse:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">On one hand, they'll say that it's OK to price a PDF at 40$ and the book at 60$, because the PDF had almost just has much work going into it (design, art, writing, etc) and that the additional expenses of the physical product are a smaller sliver. I shouldn't look at the outputted product, but the inputted work.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">On the other hand, they'll sometimes not include the PDF with the physical book. Didn't I just purchased for the inputted work? If the outputted work doesn't matter, why should I have to buy the content twice?</li> </ul>Now, don't get me wrong. I am not at all dissatisfied with the state of the industry. I'm buying ton of stuff, I'm comfortable with the prices and most practices. But these are still interesting topics to think about. The concept of value is incredibly vague. I work in the video games industry, and customers will mostly use the infamous time of play divided by cost to put value on an interactive experience. "I'm not paying 60$ for a 10 hours game." But what if that experience moves you? What if it's shorter but has something really new and fresh? Or the quality is just higher? It's incredibly difficult to understand these motivations.</blockquote>

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