The Digital vs. Print War

Digital vs print | BCBusiness
From e-books to magazines to newspapers, in the digital vs print wars, Tony thinks the readers’ interests are being left behind.

The war between digital and print information delivery looks more like a collusion of gougers than a revolution. As a result, the reader loses.

A recent personal incident provides an interesting glimpse into the supposed revolutionary war that’s currently going on between print and digital delivery of information and entertainment.

But before we describe it, let’s get to the point: Why should you care? Today we live in a world of information. How we buy, how we entertain or amuse ourselves, how we learn, and, it could be said, how we think and view the world in general, largely comes from the torrent of information – print or digital – that we consume daily.

It appears from all accounts that digital information-delivery is closing in on print and will overtake it sometime over the next couple of years.

The medium and its price becomes very important.

Now the incident: recently Google announced that its virtual bookstore was now open in Canada, meaning we could get digital copies of Canadian books (and American, of course) through Google Canada.

I put it to the test by searching a five-year-old book on the Google bookstore website, but the $19.95 price tag was too high for an old e-book. So I checked the same e-book on Amazon: the price was only slightly lower. Hmm.

Next, I searched out a “new” copy of the physical book on Amazon and, yes, it was even cheaper. But it included a $6.95 delivery charge, which brought it close to the digital price and involved a three-week wait for delivery, eliminating the “instant” advantage of an e-book.  

Uh oh, I thought, they got me.

Then I noticed down in the used book section, some company in the U.K. was selling  a used copy of the book for one cent – that’s right, one cent – plus the $6.95 delivery charge and tax. I bought it, and it should arrive any day now.

Let’s analyze this one little skirmish in the overall digital vs. print war. For $19.95 I could get an e-copy of five-year-old information that was only good on some kind of device like a computer or reader, and couldn’t be shared with friends or others who might interested. Tied, in other words, to a single user.

Or for seven dollars, I could get a portable piece of that same information in which I could make notations and share with friends. Its only problems were that it takes up physical space and may have resulted in the death of a tree for the paper.   

I recognize that this pricing schedule has much to do with publisher agreements. With the physical book, the product was delivered and initially sold. It represents a sunk cost that can no longer be recovered unless it is somehow converted to a “new” product.

In their thinking, I presume, the digital delivery is brand new, so should cost more.

Personally, I think that’s stupid and is a leftover from the manufacturing era when the physical production (read: the factory) method ruled. Version six isn’t any better than version one.

Also, the digital version involves very little extra cost, and is not as portable or usable, so, by all rights, should be cheaper. Instead, it’s more expensive.

This comes across as nothing more than a gouge.