Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
Tha ability to buy books wirelessly has turned many into reading fiends. They don't care about DRM, they mostly don't even care about price. They do care about what others are reading, as in it is almost a status thing to read Game of Thrones. Above all they care about convenience. They make $30 to above $200 an hour and if married, spouse makes the same.
For the most part they are a new category in reading people and look to me to be able to support a significant amount of ebook sales. These people must die or run out of cash before prices drop  |
Those aren't the ones driving the ebook revolution. As much money as they have, they don't have *time* to read as fast as books are selling. The 1% of the population with 43% of the wealth are not going to read 43% of the ebooks, even though the marketing is aimed at them.
The ones driving the switch are the former buyers of thrift-store romances and used-book-shop SF novels, who are willing to pay $2 per book to buy and read 10 books a week--if they can find 10 new books a week to read. Those people, who are students and housewives than any other categories, have mostly been invisible to publishers' marketing campaigns; their voracious reading habits were considered irrelevant because they didn't feed into the royalty stream.
They're also the ones supporting the darknet filesharing, because they come from a background that assumes that resources of any sort are expected to be shared. When they're done with a book, they hand it along to someone else who hasn't read it. Anything else feels like sending used books into a paper shredder in order to force future readers to buy a new copy.
Ending the commercial threat of piracy will take acknowledging those readers and finding a way to convince them not to distribute their files widely. That's probably going to require a way to legitimately distribute to family and close friends, because right now, there's no legal difference between "email an ebook to your aunt in another state" and "upload the ebook to megafileshare and PM the link to your aunt... and if she shares the link around, well, so what?"