From: Avatar Polymorph (avatarpolymorph@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Sep 05 2002 - 01:23:48 MDT
DAMIEN BRODERICK 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 is right. He knows much more about the industry than I do, though I
have worked part time in it.
Unit cost arrangements, printing tech and distribution networks are
especially apparent in Australia, with its absolutely bizarre population
distribution and its historical function as a feeder network for surplus
UK/US bookstock (since the 1930s).
A blank digital paperback courtesy of the soon-to-be-superrich eink or
gyricon people should cost about $US100. (Using one sheet and reloading it
constantly will be much cheaper but it will wear out sooner.) A paper
battery page has already been made so resetting the book periodically is
easy. A large library will fit onto 100 CDs now (about 20,000 paperbacks)
and onto 1 CD in 2004. Internet downloading time for a novel is currently
about a minute (or less with cable).
WHAT WILL WE SEE?
1. Cafe bookstores where you will conveniently browse thrugh title
list/cover/intro pages and pick your titles. Stock on the shelves will
rotate (be reloaded periodically) in some cafe bookstores. Perhaps they will
be a "top 20 sellers" reloaded each hour.
2. Cheaper prices in general. Ordinary books becoming more expensive - their
tech will probably drag through lack of investment.
3. Rise in importance of publicity, information management, to some extent
editorial work, and particularly REVIEWING.
4. Many different types of distribution deals.
5. Odd cases where individuals with virtually no backing and no publishers
but a suddenly popular downloadable book site will become instant
millionaires riding the Netwave and reaping most of the profit.
6. A resurgence in classic out-of-date title, e.g. 60s and 70sf science
fiction (current libraries throw out books after 10-15 reads and don't
replace them - even if they weren't out of print).
7. Internet newspapers (which have just overtaken printed newspapers)
prsopering, with smaller staff numbers possible and less reliance on
advertising. Text is cheap, images are cheap. Only video and datawaves are
difficult.
8. Vastly more titles, some with few readers, some with few readers but some
little profit (two or three hundred dollars...)
9. Joining of translation software with digital paperbacks and textbooks to
give the English-speaking world access to world libraries (of an initial
certain quality).
I could think of more but I'm running out of time!
And there's no comparison with uniform-unit-cost but expensive
print-on-demand, though p-o-d will have helped some out of print authors a
bit. P-o-d technology will be largely bypassed by digital paper and digital
paperbacks.
[for further info see eink.com or eink and gyricon (xerox)]
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