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Originally Posted by Patricia
"Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. ..."
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The broader point, that people who feel marginalized, unhappy or frustrated tend to make dumb spending choices to feel better, is a valid one. The world today just isn't like the world Orwell describes, though. "Underpaid" is a relative term, but "underfed"? The English speaking world suffers from mass obesity, not lack of food. And luxuries don't, in any meaningful sense, cost more than necessities. People buy prepackaged food for convenience, but it is far more expensive than making your own, and less healthy (hence in part obesity.) Compare the cost of a frozen lasagna, a bag of pre-washed and chopped lettuce, a bottle of vinaigrette and a Sara Lee cake: it's about three times what you'd spend on the ingredients to make your own three course dinner, which wouldn't be loaded with salt, sugar and preservatives.
In all kinds of other ways, people make similar trade-offs between effort and expenditure. A dollar store will provide endless craft supplies for children to entertain themselves with, and a library vast numbers of children's books, but these take time and effort and supervision, so most people buy a PSP or a Wii, spend a fortune on it, but take the easier way out. (Again, obesity results from kids spending most of their waking hours sitting on their butts.)
As for shoes? I just bought myself, at a discount department store, some very comfortable and sensible off-label shoes. They're durable, based on other things of the store label's lines that I've bought, and they cost $40. Amalfis and Ferragamos (Jimmy Choo and Louboutin are
so arriviste) cost more than a 505.
People make choices. Unless they're robots, they have the ability to make better choices. I've never been comfortable with the disenfranchisement of the poor that accompanies the worldview that portrays them as powerless victims of impersonal forces.
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But what does all this chest-beating, have to do with whether e-readers will begin replacing p-books, at some point, obviously first in the places where most of the participants in this forum live? Or with DRM? What's the point?
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Erm, if you insist on a connection ...
What this has to do with the "tipping point" and ubiquity of e-readers is how people prioritize the ability to do the things that you can do with a dedicated reader. Even in the poorer sections of the west, people have discretionary income. All of us bought readers when the price of the reader seemed like a good use for that chunk of our entertainment or discretionary budgets. The question is, are there enough readers, of anything that can be read on a reader (ie web content, not just bound paper books) who find that to be a good use of their entertainment dollars, which are probably more scarce now than they used to be. I think if readers drop below $100 and DRM is easy to reconcile, they'll take off. For all the talk about multi-hundred-dollar mp3 players, I bought a generic $20 mp3 player about the size of a quarter to wear running. I would never have spent hundreds on one no matter how cool, or how many other features it had, because it's just not worth it to me. For $20? Sure. I suspect lots of people out there feel about reading as I felt about music: not for $350, plus books that cost almost as much as on paper, but if the device gets cheap enough, and the content cheap and good enough, it'll do beautifully at a mass level.