I expect that a crisis is brewing in the publishing industry. Just as Napster drove a stake into the heart of the recording industry with its free music downloads, online libraries with free text downloads are going to make book publishing problematic. Kids think that anyone who wastes money to buy a recording is an idiot. And soon anyone who buys a book will be equally out of style. So publishers and bookstores will lose sales and will start to face bankruptcy, just as some of the big record stores are right now. And less and less money will find its way to the authors. (At least bands can make money touring and playing clubs... what can writers do?) As somebody who loves paper books and who loves hanging out in bookstores, frankly I'm worried.
Hmmm Bill I think that is more opinion than fact. While napster is forcing a major change in the music industry to say it is destroying it is quite a leap. Many Muscians believe strongly in the ability to share music. What it has delt is a strong blow to the corporate music industry that many would say abuses the musician AND listener. Obviously the digital age will inpact the publishing industry in major ways too, but again to say it will destroy it is quite a jump.
Music copying isn't destroying the recorded music industry. Their own greedy, insane pricing tactics are doing it. The VCR didn't destroy the movie business. In fact, it created two entirely new profit centers (sales and rentals). Theaters are still doing fine, and movie companies are raking in the big bucks from selling and renting tapes. Wholesale copying of VHS tapes doesn't occur. One reason is, of course, the degraded nature of analog recordings, especially second generation, third, etc. (But digital copies don't degrade, and the DVD hasn't destroyed the film industry. Quite the opposite.) And while copying certainly does occur, the lines at Blockbuster on Friday and Saturday nights are still robust. People are lazy. They'll rent or buy a pre-recorded tape that's reasonably priced to avoid the hassle of stealing it over the Internet, or renting and duping a copy from Blockbuster. Digital copies of CDs are easier to make, but still a hassle. (Especially for technophobes and people stuck in older paradigms.) But people are turned off by being asked to pay $18.95 for something that costs about a buck to produce, incrementally. When CDs were first introduced, they were priced higher than LPs. This was due to start-up costs, lower volumes initially, and the premium charged for better sound. Fine. But the pricing never went down as the market matured. In fact, prices went way up! And many artists stuck with the same 35-45-minute recordings when CDs have about double that capacity. Where's the value? (Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" and "Blue Moves," both double albums, fit nicely on one CD each.) Okay, but DVDs are digital and can be copied. Will THEY kill the movie industry? No way. First, DVDs have come down in price (both to buy and to rent). Second, they're offering more value by adding additional material. Even DVDs of older, re-issued movies are a bargain; they're cheap, and they're often bundled for even more savings. People will pay a little bit. But if you try to gouge them, expect them to cheat. Ask the cable TV companies! Look at the software industry. People got tired of paying four or five hundred dollars for software that cost nickels to reproduce. Then other competitors (like Borland) got involved, delivering quality software for a quarter of that. Then came shareware. Software piracy, while still an issue, has dropped off the radar as a big threat to the industry. Why? Because prices have come down, and people will pay reasonable prices to avoid hacking and cracking programs to get what they need. You want to look at what ails the music industry? You'll have to look waaaaaaaaaaaay back. Since the dawn of rock-and-roll, you've had payola scammers (see Dick Clark), guys ripping off artists (Alan Freed stealing from Chuck Berry), managers bleeding their artists dry (Col. Tom Parker, even after Elvis died), and record companies running their companies like fuedal fiefdoms (Barry Gordy, for example). The recording industry needs to take a few lessons from the film and software industries. Good products at reasonable prices. How hard is that?
None of us have anything but opinions about events that are yet to occur. I never said that the "digital age" will destroy the publishing industry. I suggested something more modest: that the propect of libraries offering free downloads of books might seriously cut into sales of books. It's not the "digital" or the "download" part that is the problem, so much as it's the free part. I may be wrong, but I need convincing. Let's ignore the music and publishing industries. Let's pretend that you and Rich have convinced me that they are all a bunch of greedy evil capitalists. Let's stipulate that it would be a victory to drive every last one of these parasites out of business. But what about the artists? If I can download a free copy of any book in existence from some library, or a free copy of any recording that I want to hear from some Napster-like service, who is going to pay the creative talent? Starving artists who create purely for creation's sake and then give their works away free to the community is a wonderful romantic (and socialist) vision. But I wonder if it would be quite as desirable in reality as it is in imagination. We might soon encounter a shortage of willing artists. What reward would this kind of model preserve for the artist? How could a creater support him/herself? What would the economics look like?
