More or less relevant, maybe, possibly, I suppose (not to balloons, maybe, but to inflated prices).

I knew science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle before I found out he was interested in writing. We used to haunt Seattle's infamous Blue Moon Tavern and we spend many hours sitting there in a booth with various others, wetting our noses and saving the world. He left for California sometime in the middle Sixties, and a couple of years later, his novels started showing up on drugstore paperback racks. He got into computers early on, and in addition to writing SF, he wrote columns for various computer magazines. He often took in computer conventions to keep up on the latest poop and to gather material.

Before he and Larry Niven started collaborating and they hit it big (racking up $100,000 advances for books like The Mote in God's Eye, Footfall, and Lucifer's Hammer), most of Jerry's SF novels appeared in paperback with a cover price of around three to five bucks. He recounts that during this period, he had an interesting exchange with an unhappy computer programmer at one of the computer conventions. The programmer was whining and squawking about people who copy programs and give them to their friends (this was before they self-destructed if not registered within a brief period). Jerry was with him up to the point where he said, "I sometimes spend as much as a year and a half writing a program. I think I deserve getting a full $495.00 per copy."

At that point, Jerry jumped ship. He said, "Look, I sometimes spend that long writing a novel, and all I get per copy is a lousy ten percent of a $4.95 cover price--if I'm lucky! I find it a little hard to work up sympathy for your plight!"

I can't help thinking of that when I remember that we now have three computers:   our desktop, and both Barbara and I now have notebooks. We have some of the same software on all three computers, and we can't just buy one copy and load it on all three, we have to buy a separate copy for each one. That runs into a pile of money!

(mutter mutter)

Don Firth