|
Probably best summarised as "If ebook sales make up 20% of the market, that might not sound like much, but something like a 20% fall in pbook sales could easily force a conventional book shop to close, so it's not a stable situation".
As for the rest, I suspect it takes much more than 20% to break economies-of-scale in printing. The point about making short stories economic again is a really good suggestion, but I'm not convinced by "enhanced ebooks". I don't see how "social reading" gives an advantage to ebooks over pbooks. And you can't argue for "a device that has everything you’ve read since high-school" without explicitly mentioning DRM.
OTOH, there is one more feedback loop of sorts. The more ebooks are sold, the more resources will be devoted to making e-reader technology better and cheaper. Without that, you still have the "£100 for a reader? That's 10-20 books I could be reading!" equation. That's the barrier the sort of trends mentioned in the article have to overcome, unless you assume a majority with an irrational *attraction* to changing the medium they read in [1].
[1] Ok, environmentalism might be a rational reason for passing over 10-20 books, but I can't honestly claim that for myself. The strongest counterargument is "free books"... but "self-promoting authors", "Baen books", and even "old classic literature" are distinct sub-genres. I don't see them covering a majority, or really touching the two biggest selling genres (modern crime and romance). It applies to myself only because I read about half the Baen Free Library on CRT, and that's several degrees removed from normality.
Not that I dismiss irrational reasons - I think marketing has been very important, fashion is also there, and my own glee in counting megabytes of digital data (500Mb+) is certainly irrational. It's just hard to analyse them like this.
|