21–30 of 78 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the upfront cost of production? It's all well and good to say each additional copy has tended towards zero but that still doesn't cover the production costs.
Simple. Pay it up front, release the files for free afterwards. The files turn into advertisements for the next piece.
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That's his point. The choice for a consumer (who knows about BitTorrent) is between paying hundreds of dollars, or paying nothing. Given that, most people will choose to pay nothing.
But I wanted to say something else. Many people how don't know about BitTorrent would still not pay.
And some would. So where does that leave the overall argument?
There's another way to look at it. eBooks sales, whether in Kindle, iBooks, or another marketplace, end up with similar dynamics to the App Store in iOS. People have paid $0.99-$4.99 millions of times over for apps such as Angry Birds that would have sold far fewer copies as a $19.99 boxed PC or game console game. I think eBook readers actually encourage buying books, and for the vast majority of the public, it's so…
I'm not arguing it's all doom and gloom but, as the article discusses, I hear a lot of reflexive "Give it away; you'll gain visibility and make money somehow." I heard that plenty as a consultant by people trying to get me to speak or write for free and it mostly didn't work then either.
The article talks about how the music industry is shrinking, but says nothing about musicians. Musicians who embrace the new reality are doing fine. What the Internet is really doing away with is a giant industry that used to be useful, but now is merely parasitic. The same is happening to the book publishing industry. We don't really need them anymore. Instead of giving $15 to a publisher who then gives $1.50 to the…
What the Internet is really doing away with is a giant industry that used to be useful, but now is merely parasitic. That can go both ways: the Internet is also breeding a generation of customers that used to value and support music & books, but now is merely parasitic. we can just give $1.50 to the author directly I'm all for eliminating middle-men, but free is still a whole lot better than $1.50; and when downloadi…
http://blog.tunecore.com/2010/10/music-purchases-and-net-rev...
I'm thinking of something like "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" - obviously Yudkowsky can't sell that because of its fanfiction nature, but something of that quality level, I think I'd pay a buck to read 4-5 episodes of it. Especially if I got hooked by the first 10 chapters being free.
This should bring lots of new opportunities, especially for fiction writers. Hopefully, less fluff and more density too. Would you pay $2 to read a highly polished 20 page manual by Steve Blank? I would. Hopefully this becomes a way for content producers to get paid to craft high quality, dense content... I think this could lead to something of a revolution in quality, dense, though shorter content.
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You're denying basic free market economics with an emotional argument. In a competitive market, the cost of a good tends towards its marginal cost of production. We get all excited as the cost of solar cells tends lower and lower, as the marginal cost of their production gets smaller. Do we "value" solar cells less because of this? "the Internet is also breeding a generation of customers that used to value and suppor…
The problem is that there are two "costs" of production: * The cost of reproduction - which in terms of software, music, and now books, is essentially zero. * The cost of producing those goods in the first place, which is very high in many cases. These are called 'sunk costs'. Prices are tending towards the cost of reproducing stuff, and people are struggling to come up with ways to cover actual production costs, whi…
The cost of buying food hasn't changed much, but the actual costs of doing the recording/release/distribution have decreased a lot, which lowers barriers to entry and increases supply.
To produce a recording whose production values are seen by the average casual music fan as "good enough", and then sell an mp3, requires much less capital investment than putting out a decent-sounding record in 1975 would have, or even a decent-sounding CD in 1990.
Sure, home recording on a Macbook isn't going to get you the quality a professional studio would get you, but the quality gap is much less than it used to be, especially for someone who spent some time reading (free) documentation on the subject. Rather than home recording producing unreleasable cassette demos, they're now often good enough to upload to YouTube or sell directly to fans. As a result, the people who've paid for professional studio time now have to compete directly with all those home recordings, whereas previously they could more or less ignore them. That drives down prices.
Related, many artists actually put a negative value on their time: there are quite a few people who love what they do so much that they're actually willing to subsidize their own art-production by working other jobs (e.g. waiting tables).
The article cites the decline in music sales, but ignores the fact that a large part of the music sales in the 90s was people buying CDs of albums they already owned--an artificial bubble which burst independently of any increase in illegal copying.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music...
"It's also a bit unfair to compare the 2000s with the 1990s, since the '90s enjoyed an unnatural sales boost when consumers replaced their cassette tapes and vinyl records en masse with CDs."
"But industry insiders and experts argue that the main culprit for the industry's massive decline was the growing popularity of digital music."
Also:
"Last decade was the first ever in which sales were lower going out than coming in."
> The role of piracy. I think we know. And the trends are negative, for both readers and authors. Except that the role of piracy is anything but clearcut. As Tim O'Reilly famously said in 2002 [1]: "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy." Again and again over the past several years, we have seen both studies and anecdotal stories from artists finding that file sharing produced…
The idea is that the marginal cost of a copy of windows (or a electronic copy of a book) is zero. If the end user is unable to pay for a copy, it's definitely better for Microsoft (and, I believe, better for the publisher and author) for that user to get a free copy, understand it, and contribute to the reputation of the product as "the one to use" than for that user to use another alternate product. Where would Microsoft be if all the poor people just used Linux? in a world of hurt, I think. I believe the same could be said for book publishers and authors.
The problem, from the point of view of those trying to make money off this zero marginal cost good, is that if it's just free, many people who could pay for it would take it for free.
This is where enforcement comes in (and why it's in the interest of publishing companies to keep the penalties civil rather than criminal) If I have no money, generally, I'm going to be a lot less concerned about people suing me. You can't get blood from a stone. On the other hand, once I have some assets, suddenly the idea that you could take them away is a big deal, and maybe paying out a few dollars for insurance make sense.
Now, obviously, suing a poor person is still a pain in the ass for the poor person, so you can't sue /everyone/ who pirates your work, but for those with assets, just suing some can get the fear juices running enough that they pay for nearly all their software.
The IRS uses a very similar model; they trust you to calculate and pay the correct taxes, and then they check some small percentage of returns, and heavily punish people who cheat.
I think we'll see more serialized, short length, low price point works. Will someone pay 99 cents for 20-30 pages of a well-crafted story? I think probably yes. I'm thinking of something like "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" - obviously Yudkowsky can't sell that because of its fanfiction nature, but something of that quality level, I think I'd pay a buck to read 4-5 episodes of it. Especially if I got ho…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that there are two "costs" of production: * The cost of reproduction - which in terms of software, music, and now books, is essentially zero. * The cost of producing those goods in the first place, which is very high in many cases. These are called 'sunk costs'. Prices are tending towards the cost of reproducing stuff, and people are struggling to come up with ways to cover actual production costs, whi…
> struggling to come up with ways to cover actual production costs, which haven't really changed much The cost of buying food hasn't changed much, but the actual costs of doing the recording/release/distribution have decreased a lot, which lowers barriers to entry and increases supply. To produce a recording whose production values are seen by the average casual music fan as "good enough", and then sell an mp3, requi…
Musicians can at least do concerts, which are excludable and rivalrous, and so make for a pretty good 'traditional' product that they'll get paid for.
Writing a book is likely a bit faster than 50 years ago due to computers, but not that much, as most of it's in your head. Isn't it Neal Stephenson who says he writes everything freehand?