Quote:
Originally Posted by Kumabjorn
The first problem that appears with a market characterized by abundance is that it will come up against competition against other markets that it didn't compete against earlier. These markets on the other hand are characterized by scarcity, hence their perceived value is higher.[...]
What took 100 years for radio will likely happen in less than 30 for books.
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Comparing to radio has some problems. End-users never paid for radio content; radio broadcasters paid for content, and got the money for those payments from advertisers.
People have been attempting to subsidize books with advertising for decades, with pretty much no success. None of the suggested methods for "how to add advertising to [e]books" has overcome the essential hurdle of, "how do you make this profitable for advertisers?" (The conversation tends to center around "How do you keep it from being too annoying for readers," instead of noting that the
business problem with annoyed readers is that they don't buy more of the product that annoyed them... "readers don't like" means "not profitable for advertisers.")
Google would love to be able to offer "streaming ebooks" where you read on their site, and text ads sit politely on the side of the books. But unlike the RIAA, there's no big central organization that you can contract for book licensing rights. Can't even just contract with major publishers... every author's contract is different.
I'm not sure what the face of ebook abundance is going to be, but I'm fairly certain it's not going to strongly resemble radio business dynamics.