I’m about half way through Nassim Taleb’s [amazon_link id=”0141038225″ target=”_blank” ]Antifragile[/amazon_link], and although enjoying reading it, I don’t yet know what I think. I’ll review it later.
[amazon_image id=”0141038225″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder[/amazon_image]
Meanwhile, I loved this observation:
“Books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.”
It reminded me of reading once that books are a successful life-form because they replicate themselves so much. Coincidentally, the New Republic has this article on the way book publishing is not only surviving digital disruption but thriving. The healthy state of innovation in publishing is something I’ve written about before.
Simply declaring the publishing crisis over does not end it, unfortunately. All digital media will end up at about a buck a title. It’s what we have become used to paying for games, tunes, apps, Even shows, which require big creation bucks, are falling to a buck a title.
We as customers hate being fooled: we know we are buying electrons, not atoms. And we know we don’t own ebooks in any real sense of that term; we cannot lend or resell them. We are users or borrowers, not owners.
Tunes, apps, and games are all cottage industries; no big money is required to create them. Writing books has always been a cottage industry, whereas publishing is an intermediary and now temporary fact of book buying. So a buck a title is about right.
Maybe I’m too optimistic, and I’m certainly with you on some of the drawbacks of e-books, but your comment doesn’t address the points made in the New Republic article about books not (all) being divisible into small chunks, the way an album is into tracks; nor about the ability so far of publishers to innovate and increase margins – that didn’t happen in music or video.