It's a continuum of course more applicable to some, less to some other things. I find books mostly fine, and I own a huge library, to a large extent inherited. CD albums already seemed dubious to me and hardly bought any, with software products it is entirely on one extreme of the spectrum.
Re:Omni Group Layoffs
by 6gvONxR4sf7o on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @05:30PM
(#22753725)
Why are books fine? Publishers don't print to order. The publisher has already printed thousands before you'd even heard of the book. The only marginal cost here is delivery, and that delivery person is already likely to be going down your street with a van full of goods whether you order or not. The marginal cost is just them adding the extra stop and unload for you, which is probably pennies. Or if you go to a bookstore that already had it on the shelf, it's practically zero marginal cost.
Everything is an exercise in amortization. You seem happy to amortize the obvious parts (printing, binding, stocking, delivering), but not the behind the behind the scenes parts (writing, editing, marketing). That's a crappy distinction.
It’s absolutely immoral to me that you see a long chain of work (research, writing, editing, marketing, printing) and judge it solely on its last component (printing). There are so many physical goods where the final piece is just a small portion of the final cost.