Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Problem is, I feel sure that cannot be the case here. 
Also, I am sure that tradpub sells more than enough sweets to overwhelm several cities of Wentworths. (Even if you need the sea of indies to overwhelm a country of him.) |
The technical term is analysis paralysis. A very real effect that results from an abundance of choice.
Here's one unavoidable example:
https://www.bizfusion.nl/blogposts/A...ogrammers.post
Another example is the case of cuban ballplayers coming to the US and freezing at the choices in a typical supermarket after growing up in a environment where product variety was constrained by outside forces. Suddenly seeing even just three brands of a given product was two more than they were used to. Where western consumers grow up surrounded by choice and internalize concepts like "good, better, best" marketing and added-value differentiation and develop strategies to weed out "noise"--products they don't need or want--those young men simply saw a wall of product and couldn't cope. Being highly-paid professional athletes with multimillion dollar salaries, their agent-provided life coach would teach them the basics, usually along the lines of "until you learn your own tastes, look at the price and buy the most expensive". A perfectly valid strategy when you have money to burn though not without risk, as many a lottery winner or entertainer facing bankruptcy court has discovered.
Shopping is a learned skill. Some schools teach it, usually under home economics. Different people evolve their own shopping strategies according to their own tastes and preferences and none is intrinsically better so long as they don't land them in bankruptcy.
In the book business, built up over the centuries around an economy of scarcity and top-down control, the ebook evolution has brought about a very fast switch to an economy of abundance and many people haven't yet internalized the new paradigm. Which is where the "volcano of crap" "tsunami of dreck" stories from pundits and bloggers and the "all indie titles are unedited junk" overgeneralization come from. People used to leisurely strolls through "big" bookstores with 30-50,000 titles of all genres and formats see a Kindle store with 4M titles and suddenly the old shopping strategies fall apart. Life isn't long enough to individually inspect 4million titles. Or even 200,000.
Some adapt and develop new strategies.
Others simply stick with the old and grumble.
To each their own.
"People are entitled to their own opinions..."