[Web4lib] Kindle vs. Accessibility

[Tim Spalding]

I want to apologize somewhat for being intemperate. Bad day. Sorry for
the sarcasm.

My point is that digitization impacts different industries
differently, based on technology, legal risk, market dynamics,
demographics, etc. I'm not convinced that music is the typical case,
and everything else will follow it. I think it's hardened into a sort
of religious belief.

Tim

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 4:03 PM, Tim Spalding <tim at librarything.com> wrote:
>> Once something is digitized and made available to the public, it is "in the wild." Control over distribution falls by the wayside, just as it has with music and movies.  SOMEONE will jailbreak the Kindle.  SOMEONE will find a way to strip the "no audio" flags out of the files.  SOMEONE will find a way to make the files readable on any device out there.  The files will be distributed on BitTorrent and its successors.  The masses of tech-capable folks out there will always be one step ahead of the publishers and other authorities, because they have numbers on their side. Publishers, authors, Amazon, etc. can recognize this and reformulate their business plans, or they can fight it and lose in the end, like the music and movie industries.
>
> I think this is an essentially religious argument. Whether it's
> Christ's return in 1979 or the end of the movie industry, reality
> matters. In fact, movies have been hurt by digitization piracy much
> less than music movies because movies are harder to "jailbreak."
> Everyone's computer copies, decodes and rips CDs by default. Computers
> don't do that with DVDs by default. You need to make a significant
> effort. And the relative bandwidth difference makes movie copying a
> more expensive, labor-filled thing. Yes, some movies are pirated, but
> it's nowhere near the problem it is in music. I might also add that,
> even if we accept that book copying will be rampant ten years from
> now, publishers are *rational* to extract non-piracy rents now, when
> it's still possible.
>
> It's unclear where books will fall. Books are tiny files, so that
> won't be a problem. But, so far, they aren't zipping around easily,
> and you can expect publishers to try to hold onto that for a while. I
> also think the demographic matters. Music piracy is driven by
> teenagers. Adults are more likely to buy their music. The publishing
> industry's center is the 40-year-old woman. I don't think that's the
> BitTorrent demographic. We'll see if it becomes one. I suspect that if
> the film industry exercises sues a teenager into the ground every few
> years, soccer moms twenty years from now will still be wary of
> stealing large numbers of Hollywood movies.
>
>> The issue of author profits vs. publisher profits vs. Amazon profits is one that those parties will have to work out among themselves.  In the meantime, Amazon is alienating a portion of their potential user base, just as they have done be stripping sales ranks off "adult" materials.
>
> It's tempting to believe things that fit out world view. You are quite
> wrong on the Amazonfail thing. As Clay Shirky writes (see
> http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/04/the-failure-of-amazonfail/) it
> was easy to believe Amazon did what it didn't do because it fit so
> perfectly in with (some) peoples' view of the world. I think the same
> underlying thing is to blame here—you're imagining the world is and
> will be what you want it to be. That's not a good way to predict
> things.
>
> Tim
>



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