5 - Hemmingway Redux: Dead Men Beating You At Your Own Game

This is a tale I heard in my youth.
Ernest Hemmingway was at a party in Hollywood. He was asked, "What did it take to be a successful writer?" His quoted response was "Either you do something new, or you're beating dead men at their own game." In the analog world, it was much easier to be dead men at their own game. After all, the dead Bambino (Babe Ruth) was not going to swing at even an amateur's pitch. However, in the Digital World, the Bambino never died and everybody can have him at his peak on their baseball team.
How do you out-hit Babe Ruth?
How does this apply to your life in the Digital World?

As I write this, I have Louis Armstrong playing on my stereo. Pops died in 1971, but I'm still listening to his artistry. What he did, no one has done it better. Of course, he has lots of company. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Garcia, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Hank Williams.... the list goes on and on. And that's the problem. If you're a new musician, how do you do it better? And if you're going to do it differently, the remaining choices to create in keep getting less and less. But at least in music, due to current copyright laws, you're on a level playing ground. The dead men (and women) you're competing with charge their customers just like you do. So the customer has no economic reason to listen to Satchmo instead of your garage band. What would happen if all of Satchmo's works were free? Could you compete?
Well, in Britain some of them might be available free, legally, if there were the equivalent of a Project Gutenberg for music as a repository. Many of the performances are free, as in Britain, an actual performance is only copyrighted for 50 years flat. If the song involved has fallen into the public domain, then the whole thing could be passed around free in Britain. Nobody has set up a music equivalent of Project Gutenberg yet, so this is a moot point, today...
Even so, you're still competing with dead men at their own game. They're not going away, as would happen in the analog world, due to the old recording wearing out. They don't wear out on the Digital World.
 But in the book world, you are competing with dead men who charge nothing.....

Books are constructed to last a long time. Admittedly some were constructed so poorly as to last only a few reads and/or a few years, but these are the vast minority. I have mass-market paperbacks, which are still in quite readable state after 50 years, and readable hardbacks that are over 80 years old. They were the first mass-produced item of the information age, and have been around for over 500 years. This leads to two competitive problems for new authors and new books. First, competition from existing, older books that are sold used. And second, legal Digital versions of books whose copyright has expired, despite the best efforts of copyright holder to keep extending the terms of copyright. I'll cover each separately.
Some people only read a book once, or have so many books that to but a new one means getting rid of an old one to make room for it. What do you do with the leftover book? American are culturally reared to never throw away a book in good condition, so the result has been a used market, just like a used market for older cars or other durables. People buy and sell used books, usually at far cheaper prices than new, for which the original publisher (manufacturer) sees nothing from the sales. Publishers always grumbled this at, but they could do nothing about it, as American law did not allow recoupment of intellectual property rights once a product was sold. Still, this was consider a minor nuisance, due to the fact that finding a particular title was very difficult, as each used bookseller was independent from the others, and nobody felt that it was worth the effort to catalog and advertise all the books they had. So used book buyer had to go to various stores and browse the shelves, looking for wanted titles. It was so inefficient that most people would buy a new edition of an old book rather a used one, because it was readily available, which couldn't be said of a used copy.
The coming of the Internet completely changed the dynamic. If you want to buy a used book, go look at some of the websites, which act as aggregators of thousands of used book dealer’s inventories. You will find a copy of almost any book, no matter how obscure, available for sale. For example, I just searched for 6 books, compromising a circa 1960 pulp juvenile science fiction series (the Dig Allen series). All 6 were available. Until the internet, I had been missing one of them for 25 years. I had never seen one to buy. Now, each and every used book is a direct competitor to a new book sale, readily available. Writers end up competing with themselves. And as Peter Lorre said in Casablanca, they find themselves cheaper...Why spend $8 for a mass-market paperback when you can buy a used one for $5 (with postage) or a hardback for $6? Books that had been out of print for 50 years are readily available, competing with the latest author.
But those are the easy competitors. What about the books on which copyright has expired? That's where the Digital World shows its glorious teeth, fangs, and claws. For there is nothing to prevent these book from being converted into digital versions, which can legally be passed around to anybody, for free. And they are!
For example, Project Gutenberg was founded to do just this. As of this writing, it has over 27,000 different file available for download. They're not alone. Other countries have different rules for Public Domain, so there are different sites with different books available. There are probably 30 to 35 thousand books available in the public domain, in one place or another. And they all have the same price - free.
And this is the ultimate competitor. I can read Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Alexandre Dumas, Henry Thoreau, Edgar Rice Burroughs, L. Frank Baum, Zane Grey, and thousands of other writers for free. Legally and easily. Just go to a website and select the book, click on it and save it to your computer. If a book is in the public domain and you don't see it, well, scan it yourself and put it there. (I've done 5 so far, with one in progress and another promised, and another 10 on the waiting list if nobody else does them first...) There's been billions and billions downloaded so far.
That's the problem for the publishing industry. The Digital Bambino is still swatting 'em out of the ballpark, for free. If you want to make the team, you have to out-hit him. Very, very few can. Not only do you have to out-hit him, but you have to convince the owner that spending money on you is worth more than getting the Bambino for free. So it's not a matter of beating dead men at their own games any more. The dead men are now starting to beat you at your own game, even when you are doing something new...