Another reason e-books are going to take over, probably.
(I'm assuming you can adjust the size of the print....)
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Was reading an article that was arguing that file-sharing was not the cause of the decline in the music industry:
"Downward pressure on leisure expenditure is likely to continue to increase due to rising costs of living and unemployment and drastic rises in the costs of (public) services," says the report.
Having less money for entertainment has played a huge role in the decline of items like CDs." (LAW AND DISORDER.)I call bullshit. From the perspective of a storekeeper, the PRICE of things isn't usually the real issue. PRICE rejection comes at the end of the game, not the beginning.
For instance, during both the Pog boom and the Beanie Baby boom, I saw young and old spending money like water -- they wanted it, they wanted it now, and they'd pay anything to get it.
Then the boom turns to bust, and you can't give the damn things away....
In other words, demand was all important.
Another example, people are constantly telling me that sports cards are too "expensive." Well, right now, I have .50 and 1.00 packs. Those brand new 1.00 packs are probably LESS expensive than old .50 packs from 30 years ago when inflation is taken into account.
"Yeah, but those are junk cards." They are junk cards because they are cheap. See the reasoning? What they are really saying is, they want expensive cards cheap -- but if they are cheap, they are junk. You can't win.
I suspect that file-sharing was very much responsible for much of the decline in music sales -- just like it will for movies and books. (Which is a reason the the publishers and studio's ought to keep fighting it -- it may not have worked for the music industry, but neither did giving in...But no one is going to take that advice -- )
Here's a pretty astounding statistic, that I just read on Tilting at Windmills:
In the...."music industry...digital sales are up 1000%+ over the last six years, yet global revenues are down an astonishing 31%..."
So, will digital ever generate the same revenue as the physical product, and if not, how does the infrastructure beneath the industries survive? And if they don't survive, what takes there place, if anything?
In the end, there isn't much we can do about it.
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I've taken a more or less two year window or timeline in gauging the effect of e-books (and e-comics).
Two years out, what do I see?
I feel pretty confident about this time span. I'm always prepared to vary my inventory to compensate for rising and falling sales. I have a hard time imagining that either books or comics are going to be gutted -- slowly diminished, maybe. But that was always possible for a variety of reasons.
I'll just be keeping my eye on that two year horizon...
2 comments:
There is a substantial difference between books and music.
In the music area how many different artists do you need to account for 80% of the music sold in the US. I would suspect that it is a couple of hundred at most.
Most music is sold by a relatively few artists that are widely known. Those artists tend to produce a fair amount of works.
On the other hand most authors are relatively unknown, and publish few works per year. The number of authors to account for 80% of sales in the US would be thousands or tens of thousands.
A certain degree of copying works would actually benefit most authors more than it would hurt them.
"I'm assuming you can adjust the size of the print."
Yes, you can, which is a nice thing for us presbyopic geezers.
Got my wife a Nook for her birthday. She loves it. Bought 25 books for 99 cents. True.
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