Thanks for your comments and encouragement, everyone.
ficbot -- yes, probably it's crazy and would be a nightmare to administer!
Ben -- I'll keep bouncing back for as long as I can. Your model is used with great success by
Alexandra Erin, and is something I might well look into.
K-Thom -- the thing to do is not take it personally. Easier said than done, I know.
zerospinboson -- that's fascinating. We should never assume anything; only make observations based on firm scientific evidence, which my experiment does not really provide. And indeed Penguin and other publishers are working on supercharged editions with hyperlinks appropriately placed in the text: an ideal use for an iPad.
lene -- you are very sweet, but only satisfied readers were asked to pay. If the books are on your TBR list, there's no need for you to do so. Please PM me. It's late here, so I probably won't get back to the computer till tomorrow.
NightGeometry -- some of the most amazing wildlife photography is the work of amateurs, so I know just what you mean. You have to do these things for the love of it. No one sensible goes into any sort of artistic endeavour with the aim of making a fortune. Still, we can always try!
Ralph Sir Edward of this parish posted the following thoughtful comment on my blog, and I hope he won't mind if I paste it here:
Quote:
It seems appropriate to comment here. Quae Rara, Cara. The Romans weren't dummies, although we like to think so in modern times. Perhaps, Hemmingway might be more appropriate "You're either writing something new, or you're trying to beat dead men at their own games."
There are several ways to look at the current situation. I mention two.
First, technology changes form. By that I mean that how an entertainment is enjoyed is dependent upon what the technology of the times permits. For example, music. 150 years ago, you choice for enjoying music consisted of going out to hear a concert being given, or making your own, limited to what skills you had. To utilize those skills, you needed to purchase a template of the music you wanted to reproduce, called sheet music, printed with a unique nomenclature to describe how to reproduce the music. Today, the technology has totally bypassed the idea of making your own music, you merely reproduce your favorite music on demand. The idea of self-reproduction of music is so arcane that Project Gutenberg had dormanted the sheet music section, due to lack of interest. Even free, there is little interest. Time has passed it by.
I suspect that technology is doing the same for linear reading. Things like Massive Multi-Player Online Games, Internet interaction, and the sheer availability of past story-telling, is making the demand for new product drop steadily. Scarcity is being killed in the digital world, and anything based in scarcity is going to fail. I say this not to be offensive, but merely to state the new reality.
Second, it's not just limited to the digital items themselves, but consider the secondary aspect you didn't mention, the vast expansion of marketplace availability of obsolete items. I hear about a fifty year old book, which has been out-of print for forty years. Thirty years ago, the odds of my being able to find it in a used book store was fairly low, I might spend years hunting for that book. So only the most dedicated even tried, the others bought the new equivalent product. Today, you just go out to American Booksellers Exchange, and odds are that you'll find it right off, in various conditions, at various prices. You may consider them too high, but they are . And that makes them competition, as out-of-print is no longer a reduction of competition. And that is not even making digital copies, merely digital indexing and marketplace access.
Over the last two hundred years, we, as a society, have created an enormous mountain of entertainment, more than can be enjoyed in ten lifetimes. The system depended on the "forgetting" of previously created works to make room for the creation of new works. This has been shattered by the new digital technology. Like the surviving American jet fighter pilots over North Vietnam, that consumers are starting to "flip off the switches" to reduce the entertainment load. It should be no surprise that they are flipping off the most expensive sources first....
17 February 2010 14:43
Blogger Richard Herley said...
Excellent stuff, if I may say so, Ralph. You're right, I didn't even get into the question of the internet and second-hand books.
Apparently World of Warcraft is so addictive that there's now a club for "Warcraft widows" where they share ideas about getting their husbands back.
Was there ever such a club for the spouses of Dickens's most avid readers?
17 February 2010 16:32
Anonymous Ralph Sir Edward said...
Perhaps not, but think of how many kids were told by their parents - "Get your nose out of a book and go do something..." Similar concept, I imagine...
Richard, if you are interested, (and no reason why you should be), I wrote a Precis of these ideas on MobileRead under the title "And The World Changed". Look under Edward, Ralph in the e-book section. I placed it in the Public Domain, don't worry about downloading it...
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I did, and it's on my TBR pile.