Quote:
Originally Posted by sabredog
Could not agree with you more.
If they have a nice, large slush fund available to use copyright lawyers with associated legal costs, plus "incentive" money for US senators, then surely they can re-direct that slush fund to restructuring their business model.
Throwing multi-scads of dollars at those two areas is exactly akin to the dutch boy plugging the dike. Far too late to stop the tide.
Deal with the issue of WHY customers are turning to the darkside. There are plenty of studies that strip away those who simply will not pay for anything and evaluate why the rest of the darksider's do what they do.
Afterall, if a potential customer has the money and has the desire to buy an ebook. But is prevented into either doing so due to Geo restrictions, cost or prevented from format shifting because they have a new ereader, then rectify that so to keep the customer and make the sale.
Simple? Seems not.
Now they are beginning to blame the whole issue on the demise of SOPA....sigh.....
Oops...another hole has opened up....
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Restructuring the business model is the sine qua non of any digital distribution method in future, and if it's not done voluntarily then it will probably happen involuntarily.
There's a very good analysis of what has happened in the music industry here:
http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2007/1...-birth-of.html
What happened to the music industry isn't completely apposite to what's happening in the publishing industry, and some of what he recommends - direct artist publishing and easy to use good quality online stores, for example - are already in existence in the ebook world.
However some of the problems are the same, particularly the dominance of major, invested interests and the refusal to reprice digital products to a more reasonable level instead of desperately hanging on to past pricing models, and, unfortunately for the publishing world, they're the inheritors of a massive change in the consumer mindset resulting partly from the very nature of digital distribution and it's related cost structure and partly from the expectations of at least a couple of generations who have already rejected the old distribution models and all they stood for.
When you add in the mindset of some of the existing players, for example Penguin with their desire to increase "friction" before a consumer can read their product!, there's a very good possibility that the publishing industry is going to face exactly the same issues the music industry faced, with pretty much the same results.
The people on this board are very much a minority. Whatever the megasales of ereaders were over Christmas the ereading population is only a fraction of the paper reading population. However that fraction is only going to grow. To my mind the publishing industry has a choice. It can either try to get on board and drive the bus, or it can be run over by the bus.
Either way I recommend reading the above link. Agree or disagree, it's thought provoking at the very least.