Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It
Here (works without NYT site login as far as I can see):
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/we...feld.html?_r=1
Quote:
"Don’t blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader’s time or diminished attention spans. What’s undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.
In other words, it’s all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them."
In my opinion the article is on the spot to a large extent and as I mentioned quite a few times in other posts, this trend is one of the most compelling arguments for inexpensive e-books at least once a book hits its <1$ + 3.99$ s&h lifecycle, which is sooner rather than later for lots and lots of books today.