> When movies on cassette became practical, think of what it would have done to the Hollywood model if movies could be rented at the same time they hit theaters allowing people to see a movie for far cheaper than going to a theater?
> That’s what publishers did. They allowed a far less expensive version of their books to be available right away, undercutting the sale of hardcovers with the cheaper e-version
This is a fraught analogy and in a way shows the lack of forward thinking of lots of people in the book and publishing industry.
The problem is that from a customer perspective, an ebook == hardcover in nearly all ways. It has the same story, it is written by the same author, you can read it at home or on the bus. There's no difference. In fact, some might argue ebook > hardcover since it takes up no space and you can use a Kindle and all the features it has.
Watching a movie in a movie theater is about the experience of being with others with amazing sound and video quality as well as the actual movie. So movie theater > movie at home for most people.
Forward thinking would be the Steam way which Amazon has tried to do with ebooks: sell for less but make up for it with huge volume. Yet publishers often price ebooks higher or equal to physical copies.
It's sad to see this bookstore go and I wish I would have visited it since I live in Seattle. But this is a pretty poor analysis on the "changes in the over-all economy".