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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Commodities are usually defined as something where each unit is so similar that competition is only based on price. So, traditionally, field (as opposed to sweet) corn is a commodity. Now, some newer brands of field corn may have distinctive features important to some people, such as being grown from non-GMO seed, or certified as organic. In as much as such brands exist, field corn is no longer a commodity.
As the sentence of yours which I quoted implies, being a commodity can be a matter of degree. I'd say that books are much less of a commodity than cars because, in part due to government standards, the cheapest new cars (excluding two seaters, which anyway are not the absolute cheapest) can do most of what luxury models can. I know that most people consider a Mercedes far more desireable, but most is not all. I'd feel no annoyance driving the cheapest new car sold in the US (assuming air conditioning is standard, which I think it is). But reading the typical 99 cent book would be, for me, a real bummer.
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This is one part of the definiation from Merriam Webster (
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/commodity)
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4 :a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price
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I presume this is the part of the definition to which you refer. It seems to me that if books were not a commodity before the Kindle and self-publishing (and they were even then) they certainly are now. Isn't this what the large publishers feared and expressed through Authors United with all that rubbish about devaluing books. They thought by keeping supply limited and prices high books would avoid books becoming a commodity in this sense. Of course, as you suggest, the answer is not black and white. But in my view books were a commodity even then and are even more so now. In fact, with the advent of self-publishing, classically so. And the attempts of Big Publishing to differentiate their own products on the basis of quality have so far been a dismal failure.