Re:Is Amazon’s Kindle Destroying the Publishing Industry?
by richardw on Saturday May 28, 2011 @01:31PM
(#2594809)
> A book that sells 100k copies is doing extremely well, whereas an album, video game, or movie that made similar numbers would be a disasterous flop.
I'd invert that. You can have many more authors succeed because they can be happy with 100k copies. Everyone can read different books in the same month, and that's fine.
Movies, not so much. Most of the time the only movie-going options are the same 50 movies, probably worldwide. If everybody reading a book had to choose between the same 50 books because those were the only ones available this month, most authors would die horribly and a (very) few would become super-rich. Independent movie-makers are dead because the economics of making a movie dictate that very very few can pull together the required talent, manage it into an actual creation, get it distributed, market it, etc. So all power is concentrated into very few hands, who need tens of millions of views or the movie is a failure.
I reckon publishing is probably a lot more vibrant than the movie industry. Heck, we're buying (tiny data) Kindle books instead of torrenting them. I reckon the movie industry are thinking "how the heck did they pull that off?!"
I'd invert that. You can have many more authors succeed because they can be happy with 100k copies. Everyone can read different books in the same month, and that's fine.
Movies, not so much. Most of the time the only movie-going options are the same 50 movies, probably worldwide. If everybody reading a book had to choose between the same 50 books because those were the only ones available this month, most authors would die horribly and a (very) few would become super-rich. Independent movie-makers are dead because the economics of making a movie dictate that very very few can pull together the required talent, manage it into an actual creation, get it distributed, market it, etc. So all power is concentrated into very few hands, who need tens of millions of views or the movie is a failure.
I reckon publishing is probably a lot more vibrant than the movie industry. Heck, we're buying (tiny data) Kindle books instead of torrenting them. I reckon the movie industry are thinking "how the heck did they pull that off?!"