VAT is added to luxuries* - I would argue that in a civilised society books are not a luxury, but an essential, and therefore shouldn't be subject to VAT. However eBooks and pBooks should be rated the same - the content of both is the important bit, and if pBooks are VAT-free then eBooks should be too.


* Although why cake is considered essential, and a biscuit a luxury I'll never know

The storage space on the server is irrelevant, a typical ebook takes just a few hundred kilobytes (on your little PC hard drive you could fit a million) and you only need one copy of each book however many you sell. By contrast you need physical space for each paper book and if you sell 100,000 copies of a particular book you have to store them all. You then have to post them on which is more handling.

The author should get paid the same but most of the manufacturing, storage, distribution and delivery costs should go. You also get less with a digital copy as you cannot lend it to friends, sell it or pass it on to a charity shop when you've finished with it.

The storage space isn't irrelevant at all. The ebooks still take up space on a server, and the server & the storage (plus fault tolerance, network bandwidth etc.) all needs paying for.

This doesn't really qualify as "less" though. The words in the book are the same, so if you buy an ebook and a paperback (or a hardback) the content is identical. The fact that you choose to lend it to friends is immaterial and doesn't count as "less".

Any item sold through say Amazon requires details storing on the server and all the other overhead. This applies equally to both ebooks and paper books and this is roughly a fixed cost per book title irrespective of whether paper or electronic.

There are no significant extra costs associated with ebooks whereas with paper books these have to be manufactured, delivered to the warehouse, stored, packed and delivered to the customer. The storage space unlike with ebooks does cost serious money. The overheads associated with an ebook (excepting authoring and the like) are less than you would get from selling a leaflet.

It is the above costs which do not exist for ebooks, nobody (or at least I'm not) is suggesting that all ebooks should be free just that they should be considerably cheaper than paper books.

It is clearly less. How important that "less" is depends on the individual but it clearly is less as there is something you get with one format and not another.

Didn't paper books used to have a "not to be lent or re-sold" type message in them? That would mean you weren't actually being sold the book with the rights to lend or sell-on anyway.

Some may have but the fact that there is a genuine and legal market for second hand books would indicate that this is certainly not universal and probably not common. Amazon themselves sell second hand books - I've bought loads.

You still get exactly the same content in an ebook as you get in the paper version. What you choose to do with the book afterwards is down to you, not the book, its content, its format etc.

I think you're deliberately trying to miss the point Of course the content is the same, that's the part that is the same.

The extra bits (that you don't get with the electronic version) are what I mentioned above in being able to lend to friends, sell on or donate to charity shops.

If product 'a' has 'x' and product 'b' has 'x' + 'y' then product 'b' has extra than product 'a', the fact that 'x' is the same in both doesn't alter the fact that you get extra in product 'b'.

I would add to this that we know some e booksellers would like to be able to sell ebooks cheaper than they are allowed. If you go on the Book Depository website you will find large numbers are marked as "out of stock", this is because they won't sell at the inflated prices the publishers insist upon - this is currently the subject of a legal dispute, if they win then ebook prices will come down.