Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Anderson has apparently posted a response:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/...so-threatened/
"Free" has its role to play, but in general I have to side with Gladwell on this one.
I may be wrong, but Anderson's assumptions remind me of the people who travel to another country, buy a sarong for $1 that sells for $10 back home, gets dollar signs in their eyes, and 12 months later their import/export tchotchke store is already out of business. One specific aspect looks dirt cheap, and this blinds you to all the other costs involved with the business.
It might seem that digital production costs are nearly zero, but this is slightly absurd. Someone has to invest time to produce the content, edit the content, market the content, maintain the servers, and pay for the bandwidth. High-quality home music recording equipment costs a fraction of professional equipment, but you still need the expertise to use it (and use it well) -- not to mention the skills to book those shows, sell those tickets, design the posters and t-shirts and write press releases; these are not necessarily skills that a musician, particularly ones who need to work day jobs in order to put food on the table, will have or can develop. Same with movies; even a small film requires dozens of collaborators, lots of time and lots of money.
Some ventures will involve low enough overhead to be supported exclusively by advertising; but there is only so much advertising you can sell, especially without invading the product itself. I'd rather not have to see a banner ad on every third page of my e-books.
Then again, I'd be happy to see Mr Anderson put his money where his mouth is, and release all of his publications in e-book form for free.  |
The problem is that the vast majority of the digital audience don't share the same ideas about time=money. The fact that it might have taken the author five years to write their book means nothing to the downloader, it does not fit into the equation any longer when they come to make a choice from the swathe of products before them. That fact is background noise, and is especially unimportant with an audience who are schooled in the ideas of creative commons, open source and the information=free philosophies.
Lets take as an example the amount of books that are offered every day on Mobileread for zero cost or near to zero cost (<$1). Any book now offered over these magical price points is probably going to get ignored, unless it has something more to offer. We're already at a point where zero or near-to-zero price points are becoming expected for new authors, established authors in digital format seem to get a pass for the most part, but even this is changing. A lot of avid readers refuse to pay the price-point the publishers/stores set on established authors books. They (we) do not value the digital product the same as the physical product. This is the inescapable fact of all this. Digital, because it is infinitely reproducible, has no starting worth. It begins at zero and you must add value from thereon in. Saying it took five years to write and all the rest doesn't mean anything to the end customer when they can go to Gutenberg or Feedbooks and snatch themselves a classic or new work of fiction for ZERO COST.
it's all a value proposition now. I can't remember who said it, but it was linked to in a recent MR posting, and it was a talk about the future of publishing. The speaker said something along the lines of "Product is dead, it's not about the product anymore but the context." By which he was talking of the community in which the product is offered, the value that the individual community put upon the object/information being offered. Its easy to value a pbook, there's a definitive process that must be undertaken and it has set costs at each stage. With a digital product there is no way to make the same value assumptions. Server costs/hosting? What if it's using P2P technology for distribution? What if it sits on a free blog host like wordpress, or one of the many new digital book outlets such as Feedbooks? What if it only took a weekend to write (famously the classic Incredible Shrinking Man by Richard Matherson was written in one weekend, also On the Road by Jack Kerouac).
You can't make a value assumption over a non-physical object, and the audience certainly wont make this judgement. It's the context of the object not the object itself that has worth now.
But I do agree, if he's so hell-bent for this future of free pricing, where's the free digital version of his book?