How is it possible for the "mash a tree up into pulp and dehydrate it and put ink on it and glue it together" version to cost less than the "ones and zeros" version which can be duplicated almost infinitely, almost instantaneously, and at almost no extra cost?

-Deozaan (March 29, 2011, 10:40 PM)

I realise no-one wants to hear this argument, but I'll repeat it anyway: books are different from music. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the cost of printing and shipping books accounts for 12-13 per cent of the shop price on average (a long-established cost pattern, not something recently concocted by publishers).

And as I said in a separate post, in the UK, ebooks attract 20 per cent sales tax, whereas printed books are tax free. Therefore, logically, ebooks should all be more expensive in the UK than printed books. But they're not.

I do think publishers are terrified by the ebook market and its implications, and they are making some bad decisions (e.g. the agency agreement, which can't last long as it's essentially price-fixing). But I don't think current UK ebook prices suggest we are being ripped off.

There are certainly examples of bizarre price anomalies, but that is down to the agency agreement which some publishers have implemented, so the Amazons of this world cannot discount ebooks, but continue to discount printed books. In the EU at least, the agency agreements are likely to be ripped up sooner rather than later by the lawmakers.

If EU book buyers want to get angry about something, I suggest they get angry about the fact that sales tax is applied to ebooks.

And what was the brand of the harddrive in that machine? A Maxtor perhaps? These disco's are known to get slower and slower after several years of use, though I've not been able to do any measurements on them :huh:

-Ath (March 17, 2011, 03:10 PM)

It's a Seagate. But I don't think the drive brand is relevant here -- any drive would have slowed down with that level of fragmentation.

It turns out the hard disk was badly fragmented -- the 10 most fragmented files averaging more than 20,000 fragments each! In fact it was so bad that XP's built-in defragmenter wouldn't work. I tried it a couple of times, and it just played with the files but didn't fix them. Just kept reporting that I still needed to defragment my disk!

I turned to JKDefrag, and it did the job. It took 12 hours, but it worked. So yes, in my experience, an occasional defrag is probably a good idea and yes, if your disk is in a bad way, trying a specialist program like JKDefrag is worth a shot.

-johnk (March 14, 2011, 07:16 PM)

Scary!  :tellme:

I'm guessing that this drive partition was pretty full, with something like less than 10% freespace available?
 8)

-40hz (March 15, 2011, 01:57 PM)

The scary thing was I had 35 per cent free space, and the XP built-in defragmenter still wouldn't defrag the files.