Quote:
Originally Posted by acidzebra
What I fear is that potential publishers will go down the same road that has been traveled by the movie and music industry before them, and look where that has gotten them - hollow victories on a few random individuals and a lot of bad publicity, trying to lock in content (content which by its very nature defies lock-in).
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I don't worry about that too much, because the people being targeted and prosecuted are extremes... the Jammie Thomases are more akin to the guy mass-printing tapes in his basement and selling them on the street, not the average user who burns for himself and maybe a friend or two. Really, few people have much sympathy for someone who so blatantly and clumsily violates the system and gets caught. (Except for those who are also doing it.)
Besides, there are other lessons for the book industry to learn from music and movies, such as what those industries are doing to win the public over... for instance, the introduction of product placement that simultaneously dulls the impact of ad material, makes it harder to divorce the product from the content (think a bottle of Smirnoff in a James Bond movie), and allows a lesser cost for content to consumer.
Here's another: You may or may not remember that when VHS tapes were first introduced, block-buster movies could cost up to $100USD each. One of the first VHS tapes to introduce advertisements to the content--a Coke ad--was
Batman (Keaton/Nicholson), and it retailed for an unheard-of $25. Although people railed against an ad on their tape (shown before the movie, of course), they also bought those videos like there was no tomorrow, and ushered in an era of affordable video content thanks to advertiser subsidies.
I already mentioned how TV ads pay for the content we watch. And I guarantee you music videos are a great source of product placement revenue (every time you see a luxury car in a video, for example, you know the car maker paid for that exposure, and hence brought down the cost of producing the video).
These are lessons that the publishing industry has largely not applied to itself, and I think it's high time they did (with some adjustments to cater to the differences of the media). Such methods (and possibly combined with others) can lower the cost to consumer, or even replace it with other revenue, allowing e-books to be cheap-to-free, and reducing the amount (and penalty) of pirating. In a medium and market where sellers cannot justify high costs of "electronic product" to consumers, it behooves them to investigate other ways of making that money.