Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
That's all I'm trying to say... you said it better (emphasis added by me).
Someone correctly guessed that the "reading public" just might be willing to embrace ebooks. Then Sony & Amazon gambled that the reading public might embrace a dedicated device to read those ebooks on.
Is Shatzkin asking me to believe tech companies had some sort of special insight—or magic eight-ball—that allowed them to ascertain what readers of books might be willing to embrace in the way books are read? More so than the publishers who rely on those same readers for their livelihood? If that's true, then they deserve to be fighting and clawing for relevance right now.
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Only vaguely related, but there's an article
here on the signs that the tv industry is about to experience the same collapse as the newspaper industry. The author's point is that established industry participants in general are very reluctant to admit that there's any problem at all, or that upstarts may eat into their business, right up until the point that those upstarts drive the old guard off a cliff.
It's interesting to note that being short-sighted isn't confined to any particular industry.