Piracy on the Spanish main book market

From the Grauniad re arbitrage in book prices (hat tip Neville Hobson):

As book prices go, €5 is a bargain almost anywhere. In Spain, where publishers like to keep prices on paperback novels above the €20 level, it is unheard of.

Now a ground-breaking deal involving Nobel prize winners such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Camilo José Cela has seen an offer of two novels for ¤10 on classics by the authors of One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Hive.

There is only one catch: the books do not come on paper, but as digital downloads.

Two reactions:

(i) Euro 20 is a ludicrous price for a paperback, the market is clearly ripe for physical dis-aggregation, never mind digital

(ii) Euro 5 is still high compared to the costs of provisioning an e-book, someone is clearly still profiting here, and it is unlikely to be the content creator.

In fact in many (most) markets we looked at in our eBook work, they are still hugely overpriced, especially considering the user is also being asked to fork out Euro 200+ for an e-Reader. In many cases the physical book is the cheaper net deal.

Which is worse - piracy or scalping? One begets the other in our view. As has been shown in music, most people intuitively know the "fair" price and will pay it, but behavioural economics shows we would rather be pirates than be scalped.