> Gareth says "Information wants to be free" and others point out
that
> it is not unreasonable to pay the author of the scenario something
> for his time and effort in producing the material in the first
place.
Qualifier: I think its perfectly reasonable to pay people for their creative work, but that the majority cost in print is the printing. Thus if someone flogged a PDF at the same rate as a paper product, I'd be pissed off, becuase they are NOT, like for the print company, having to bear part of the costs that went into investing in all that machinery - printing presses, delivery trucks, the works. All of this composes a big chunk of the end unit price - and if this cost does not exist, the company has no right to charge an equivalent rate.
...whereupon you hit a second batch of problems. you now have a cheap product that is easily (indeed, infinitley) transportable and reproducible, BUT your processing cost per transaction (via paypal) is now a goodly proportion of the overall unit cost again. And unlike fixed assets (print press, vans etc), this processing cost is variable with sales volume, so you don't even profit from an economy of scale.
Now, what a company could do is invest a similar level of resources that it used to spend buying print services and machinery (by proxy) into product design and production. Hire more writers ansd artists, that sort of thing. This recovers the unit price to something that is worth the transaction cost to sell, but most companies are wary that a product that does not occupy physical shelf-space will struggle to sell large unit volumes and hence recoup investment costs.
Therefore, I don't think it is necessarily morally wrong to go down this route, merely impractical as a business proposition (as businss is currently constituted). Whereupon, why not do it for free? All power to the electronic soviets.
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