From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Sep 04 2002 - 23:00:22 MDT
At 01:57 PM 9/5/02 +1000, I wrote:
>the Invisible Hand is busy stuffing the shelves with the
>latest Star Wars franchise pap
To forestall any Guides to the Ignorant Perplexed, I should acknowledge
that this sort of blockage is (mostly) not due to the market's unseen paw
but rather to its being thwarted by oligopolies, marketing chains and other
bottlenecks. Bring on read/write e-paper, I say! Let 1000 legible, truly
portable fold-up-in-your-back-pocket downloads bloom!
Now obviously, intelligent, even demanding writing (movies, music, medical
advice, whatever) is never going to sell as many copies as feel-good,
brainless pap, by orders of magnitude. That doesn't mean we should be happy
to see a few elephantine they're-everywhere-they're-everywhere outlets
setting sales policies that shrink choice to the handful of mean-fit items
of the month/week/day. I know it's not the Market, but it's what I find
when I visit the market.
Damien Broderick
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