Interesting Links for 25-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• Coalition, Government and the Lords
  (tags: government uk)
• Bullied by Gays- A catalog of pupils driven to suicide by gay bullies
  (tags: lgbt suicide satire)
• Five Emotions Invented By The Internet. I have experienced all five of these.
  (tags: internet psychology emotions funny)
• The downward spiral of ownership and value (It's happened to music, it's happening to books.)
  (tags: books copyright ebooks)
• Wolfenstein 1-D: The Game That Changed Everything, Converted to a 1-Pixel Line
  (tags: videogames wolfenstein funny)
• The economics of Net Neutrality
  (tags: internet economics markets)
• Why the Cornish hotel ruling should worry conservative Christians - digs into the details of the actual ruling.
  (tags: christianity homosexuality law religion sex society)
• Genetically modified crops are the key to human survival, says UK's chief scientist
  (tags: environment gm food)
• BBC to cut online budget by 25% - close 180 websites.
  (tags: bbc online)
• Why Africa needs an agricultural revolution
  (tags: africa agriculture technology poverty government)
• Government scraps Labour plans to scrap the Common Travel Area between UK, Ireland and Isle of Man.
  (tags: government uk travel)

Comments

[andrewducker]

I wonder if there's something there about niches.

If those books were massive sellers then they'd be on Pirate Bay and people could get them for free. By energising a niche market you can get them to hand over cash for something that they see as giving them an advantage they cannot get for free. If an author outgrows that niche then they'll hit the point where their work becomes available for free and their revenue will go down.

Hmmmm.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting thought.

However - do we actually have any examples of people who have suddenly seen a massive drop-off in cash flow thanks to piracy? Most superstar authors still seem to be doing OK.

(Not trying to destroy the argument, geninuely interested. I think your niche idea is a valuable one.)

[andrewducker]

I have no idea what the sales figures for major authors are like, and whether they are taking much of a hit from piracy at this point.

Hard to tell, I'd guess, as you can't really compare sales across different books for the same author. You'd have to look at (say) the sales across the NY Times bestsellers year-on-year and see if they dipped.

The thing is that ereaders, successful as they are, haven't yet taken a massive bite out of the book market, so far as I know. There are, what, 12-15 million Kindles out there, and maybe the same again of other ebook readers? Compare that to the number of MP3 players on the market. If ebook readers become the norm then the market will be quite different to a situation where ebooks are only a small fraction of the book market.