The MONETARY value of something is what people are willing to pay for it. If you're only WILLING to pay $5 for something then that is it's monetary value. Now it may have more intrinsic worth to some people, it may have value that goes beyond money, but monetary value is determined by what people are willing to pay. And when people are talking about value and price they are speaking about monetary value. The fact that others want to extrapolate the conversation onto "intrinsic" value has nothing to do with the facts.
If some people are willing to pay $50 and some are only willing to pay $5, then you have to decide which clientele you are going to cater to. (I say go with the $50 crowd. The more a customer has to pay for something, the less they generally whine about it later.)
But FREE indefinitely for everything WILL devalue your work. It won't devalue everyone's but it will devalue yours, because when you train people to believe what you are providing has no monetary value outside of a hard copy of whatever it is, i.e. the story/information/entertainment has no inherent monetary value, then they will never buy it from you.
I believe in the power of free, but I also believe in too much of a good thing. But I suspect eventually those who are such "information wants to be free" proselytizers will see the light when it doesn't work out for them well enough in a real-world financial sense, or when hard goods are such a minority percentage of sales that you have to be able to sell digital to survive. (i.e. sometime in the next 10-20 years.)
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Monetary Value vs. Hippie Value:
http://zoewinters.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/monetary-value-vs-hippie-value/
I'm going to have to disagree.
The MONETARY value of something is what people are willing to pay for it. If you're only WILLING to pay $5 for something then that is it's monetary value. Now it may have more intrinsic worth to some people, it may have value that goes beyond money, but monetary value is determined by what people are willing to pay. And when people are talking about value and price they are speaking about monetary value. The fact that others want to extrapolate the conversation onto "intrinsic" value has nothing to do with the facts.
If some people are willing to pay $50 and some are only willing to pay $5, then you have to decide which clientele you are going to cater to. (I say go with the $50 crowd. The more a customer has to pay for something, the less they generally whine about it later.)
But FREE indefinitely for everything WILL devalue your work. It won't devalue everyone's but it will devalue yours, because when you train people to believe what you are providing has no monetary value outside of a hard copy of whatever it is, i.e. the story/information/entertainment has no inherent monetary value, then they will never buy it from you.
I believe in the power of free, but I also believe in too much of a good thing. But I suspect eventually those who are such "information wants to be free" proselytizers will see the light when it doesn't work out for them well enough in a real-world financial sense, or when hard goods are such a minority percentage of sales that you have to be able to sell digital to survive. (i.e. sometime in the next 10-20 years.)