andrewducker | You can rent them by the yard

I can see big problems with getting revenue to publishers for such a service -- like how do you split revenue fairly. For example, with my kindle, I look in the dictionary moderately regularly because there's a simple cursor based word look up so if I'm not quite sure of a meaning I now look it up (e.g. destrier previously was filed as "some kind of horse" and I now know "big chunky war horse"). So I "read" the dictionary every week. Other books I might dip into to refresh my memory if I'm reading something else in the series. But by "page time" I am actually spending most of my time with various fiction books. If not carefully handled the revenue stream could be pretty unfair.

If it were priced below my current level of ebook consumption then I would do it -- but why would publishers?

Actually, I know why publishers would. Humans have an irrational love for a flat-fee model. People will provably pay more for "unlimited" broadband than for broadband charged per hour or per Gb of use. So I guess publishers could use it as a lever to get more money out of people -- at which point I would not use it since I read research literature and am, hence, unusually aware of the weaknesses in human ability to get the best deal for a service.

I like flat fee models for convenience - not having to think "Can I afford this?" or even "Is this worth the money?" is worth paying a small premium for me. As would having everything (or near-everything) being available through the one place.

I agree that the charging/payment structure would be interesting to hammer out.

This is known in psychology/behavioural modelling circles as "bounded rationality". In complex decision making people will often trade (sometimes considerable) sums of money to avoid a more complex decision process. They make an "irrational" (in the economic sense) decision because the "rational" decision is difficult. I am sometimes a victim of it despite myself: a typical example would be:
If I shopped around for an hour and did some working out I could save £5 a month on my mobile bill (guestimate) but I can't be fagged, some part of my brain is saying "it's only a fiver"... although over the two years of the contract I have wasted £120 which is considerable and certainly worth doing an hour or two of work to obtain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

For a one-off decision that will save money over time I tend to be better. When it's a constant series of decisions to make, then I'm happy to drip-feed money to prevent them.

That is the very essence of bounded rationality and at that point it is "rational" in the human if not the economic sense (which in classical economics does not account for the cost of actually making the calculations required to make an economically efficient decision).

Any theory of economics that doesn't take into account that decision-making takes time, and that "time is money" isn't worth the paper it's published on :->

You may have heard the story about the mathematician looking for his car keys under a street light. A passer by asks him if he could point out more precisely where he dropped them. The mathematician points to a place tens of metres away and says "but I can't look over there, it's too dark."

The theories we have may not be worth the paper they are published on but they are quite definitely those theories which are most accessible.

[To be fair there are non-equilibrium theories of decision making accounting for bounded rationality -- they're just MUCH MUCH more difficult.]

You can rent them by the yard

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