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Originally Posted by Sonny Blount
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It actually went vinyl->CD. Cassette was an alternate format to vinyl, not a replacement, and provided a means to have music in a portable format.
I knew lots of folks with LPs and turntable to play them. Many also had cassette players. I can't think of any offhand who
only had cassette players, or
replaced vinyl with cassettes. (I still have a turntable, and a
lot of vinyl.)
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Each of these formats required the purchase of new playback equipment worth in real terms more than an ereader.
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Sure, And people migrated because they thought it offered value (like getting a cassette player to complement the turntable and have portable music), or because they thought they had to (like conversion from vinyl to CD). MP3 players bear the same relation to CDs that cassettes do to vinyl - they're portable.
We are nowhere near the point in the evolution of ebooks where people will migrate because they think they have to, as paper books are going away. So the question is what additional value an ereader and electronic books offers over paper. Portability is one potential source of value, but may not be sufficient by itself.
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I believe the case for a physical cd or lp is slightly stronger than the need for a physical novel, yet look how quickly people have come to mp3s when then price for an album is a third of the CD.
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If you have the MP3s, you can burn your own CD if you want to.
You get the physical CD, I think, largely because everything may not be available as MP3s. iTunes encourages checking picking - getting only a few popular songs to load on your iPod - and has raised the bar for bands because it's much more important to make the album especially strong to make it worth having. It's almost a reversion to the period before the 60's, when what most kids bought were singles, and albums were things others bought for you as gifts. Albums had the singles, and filler of varying quality.
As FM radio became dominant, playlists expanded, and more bands wrote and recorded their own music, the LP became the focus, and people bought albums, not singles. There was more pressure to create albums that had more to offer than a hit single or two.
The rise of the MP3 and the emergence of iTunes has reestablished the importance of the individual song, and if you can get just the few songs you want, why buy the album?
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Dennis