From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jun 29 2000 - 22:09:22 MDT
At 05:19 AM 29/06/00 -0400, Brian Atkins wrote:
>They get what they settle for. Simple as that. No whining
>allowed. If you ain't happy then do something to make yourself happy or
>don't.
As I understand it (from one TV program), they're doing just that -
together, where they can't be so easily stamped on or picked off one by
one: they were striking for better conditions. I don't know the outcome.
>Or it could be that mostly people only want to buy the Harry Potter stuff.
>Someone asked me the other day- why is it that the top 40 music is always
>sooo lame, no matter what decade you are in? Obviously this is because
>the majority of the people out there (think of a Bell curve here) _like_
>that music.
It's not that simple, as ad agencies know. Lots of people choose to buy
Potter books because (1) they're simple and entertaining (as evidenced by
the initial word-of-mouth break-out sales), (2) they're now massively
hyped, (3) they're everywhere, crowding all the alternatives off the
shelves - since those who own the shelf space insist on it, and insist on a
series of other inappropriate accounting measures that are killing
diversity of choice. This kind of Big Marketing leads to vast booms and
busts, to enormous overstocks of books that *don't* take off and have to be
pulped, to the ceaseless toppling and replacement of publishers and editors
acting as if this were a rational process when actually it's a bizarre crap
shoot. Now that Potter is flavour of the year, I hear that every other
publisher is rushing out clones - a series by Clive Barker, etc etc. Anyone
can see that this will tend to clog the market, but you keep following the
sheep until they all fall to their deaths, then do it all over again when
cowboy stories or nurse stories spontaneously emerge as slightly more
interesting than kid wizard books. It's monocropping, with all the
temporary benefits and finally fatal dangers of that stupid practice.
Meantime, species are going extinct (and I'm one of them, whine whine).
Damien Broderick
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