Re: "The Elusive E-book"

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 8:09 PM, joseph harris <[email protected]> wrote:

>  The question this doesn't address is how do you build the
>  delivery mechanism [i.e. the infrastructure for a thriving ebook
>  industry] if there is no encouragement in terms of money from
>  profits and royalties?   There are enough attacks on the
>  copyright which enables the development of markets for the
>  businesses which have to succeed.

I'm a little confused by this. As far as I know, the only delivery
mechanism ebooks need—the Internet—has been built already. That's
where I get all my ebooks, be they free or paid.

>  It is now that the free ebook is holding back the development of
>  ebooks.   When there is a big market there are opportunites to
>  use loss leaders.

I really doubt this. We had free MP3s all over the place from Napster,
Limewire, Kazaa, BitTorrent. We still do, in fact. There's nothing
stopping people from going out and downloading all the newest releases
for free right now (apart from the fear that the RIAA might target
them with a lawsuit, and the odds against that are about the same as
the odds of winning a lottery). But that hasn't stopped an e-music
vendor, Apple's iTunes, from becoming one of the two biggest vendors
of *all* recorded music in the USA.

And consider webcomics. Most webcomics are free to read on-line. That
hasn't stopped a number of people from making a living doing nothing
but their webcomics. There are also some paid subscription webcomic
services, such as Graphic Smash, and they seem to be in no danger of
going belly-up.
-- 
Chris Meadows aka | WWW: http://www.terrania.us | Somebody help,
Robotech_Master | ICQ: 5477383 AIM: RoboMastr | I'm trapped in
[email protected] | Skype, Gizmo: Robotech_Master | a sig file!
[email protected] | Yahoo: robotech_master_2000 |

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