Sorry, lost the thread.

With e-books becoming more dominant and less money coming into the industry, the bookstores die (they're already highly marginal now). With bookstores' death, so go the publishers (after all, any established author will make more money from self-publishing and now the *one* (incredibly important) thing the publishers offer - shelf space - is gone).

With publishers gone, we all essentially become slush pile readers. The books are nearly free, but the constraint is *time*, not money, and with the publishers gone, we're now looking at instead of 1 in 10 new books being decent, we're looking at 1 in 1,000. And quite frankly, there's movies and Angry Birds on our e-book readers that have a much higher payoff rate.

Established authors do okay, but the discovery rate of new authors drops like a stone. Sure a handful get discovered each year, but the current book industry discovers thousands each year. (Where discover means they are distinguished enough from the crowd to have a *chance* at success.) As there are fewer and fewer new authors making it (but more and more authors writing for at least a generation while writing is culturally relevant), the signal to noise ratio keeps dropping.

Even worse, businesses realize that while selling books doesn't make much money, selling services to desperate authors makes a killing. If you are browsing to find a new author you know nothing about, Amazon currently shows us the top 1,000 or so books from mainstream publishers, with a few self-published in the mix. At some point, it makes a *lot* more money by showing us the top 1,000 books from the authors willing to pay the most.

And unfortunately, unlike mainstream publishers, who invest in a book not because they love it, but because they believe it will be what you want to read, would-be self-published authors aren't buying advertising based on the books quality, but on their own personal resources.

Amazon, et al. will make a lot of money for decades even as the book market to readers collapse.

Of course, old favorites won't disappear. They'll be a handful of new discoveries each year from self-publishing. Enough that books won't be "dead". But the idea that book reading will become marginal enough that it's cultural significance will essentially be irrelevant.

i.e. like poetry.

The end of reading as culturally relevant is likely inevitable. It won't disappear, but it will become like poetry - practiced by a few, and written by as many people as read it.

The sad part is that the book market as it stands today obviously makes it clear that there is a (somewhat) viable market. Unfortunately, the introduction of the electronic element means that customers would have to accept that they were paying for the content (whose price hasn't changed) rather than the physical book.

The whole $30 for a hardcover, $10 for a paperback was merely the cover story that people used to allow themselves to spend a lot more money to get the content faster. Stripped of that, most would-be customers can't accept the idea of paying $25 for the first year and then $9 for the electronic copies. They need that tangible crutch to give themselves permission to spend.

Of course, other industries have this problem as well. I will happily spend $30 on a program for the PC, but cannot bring myself to spend $10 for the app that does the identical thing because... my brain tells me $10 for the app is simply too much. So I go without and am less happy for it. Multiple this by millions, and you have the book industry.

Your recommendation is one of certain corporate death.

That's exactly the point. Failure is not having a company die. Failure is not making your shareholders a lot of money.

All companies die someday. Most companies, when they see that their success is based on a moribund market segment basically spend everything they've accumulated in years of profitable behaviour and blow it in a futile effort to replicate their success elsewhere.

Any given company may have a 1 in 1,000 chance of success when entering a new market. An established company has perhaps a 10x greater chance of success when entering a completely new market segment. So in other words, they're blowing all their shareholders money for a 1 in 100 chance of success.

They won the lottery once, and then skillfully made those lottery winning even more valuable. Now they're going stake everything on another lottery win? No thanks. Give the shareholders their money, and *if* they want another gamble let them invest in a new company and pray.

The sad fact of the tech stock market is that even if you are lucky enough to back a "winner", you will never see the vast majority of the money the company made - it'll almost certainly be wasted in a vain attempt to assuage the corporate egos that yes, we can do it again. Well, the answer is, 99 of 100 times, no, you can't.

Apple's pretty much the exception to the thousands of companies that tried to reinvent themselves and failed. Thanks, but I think MS's stock holders would be better served by giving the billions that it has and will have for the next decade or two before it's time to wind it up back to its owners.

I'd have no admiration for a billionaire that spent his billions in the last few years of life fruitlessly trying to preserve it, hoping for a miracle. Why should I admire the same in a company?

If they really wanted to do what was right for the stock holders, they should acknowledge that they've got an incredibly lucrative income stream from a gradually dying product line. They should milk the Windows/Office franchise for everything they can, while cutting down development which only at this point enrages customers who have to spend big bucks on migration costs.

Cut everything way back, and send every penny you make straight back to the stock holders (i.e. an Income Trust).

MS Stock would instantly become the hottest income stock on the market. "Hey, we're *not* going to blow every penny we've made for the last 30 years in a futile attempt to stave off the end of our industry. We're just going to make you very, very wealthy!"

MS is sitting on the world's most profitable oil field. There's no shame in acknowledging that it won't last forever - just exploit it as profitably (i.e. cheaply) as possible and give the money to the stock holders.

I really think the GOP has a strong future if it can become the "pro-capitalism, anti-big-corp" party.

And who is going to donate the billions dollars necessary for a successful campaign for a party dedicated to letting you fail if you don't measure up?

Sure, there are the odd individuals who are willing to simply take their chances. But once one has "made it", the next thing is to protect your gains. In other words, why on earth would moneyed individuals or successful companies donate money to promote a system that makes them *less* secure?

Such idiologies only had a chance before it took so much money to win an election. Now, you *must* court the wealthy to have a chance. Your only choice is which moneyed demographic you choose to promote.

Did your comment help or just confuse?

I don't know.

The salesman did start giving a more substantial explanation of the two operating systems (although I really dislike the fact that it's easy to pirate apps on Android used as a selling point), and once he pointed out the network effects ("if your friends all have iPhones", etc.), then I figured that was all the information she needed to make an informed decision and left.

I've listened in as a salesman told a woman that the Samsung was essentially an iPhone" to a woman who came in asking about it. He wasn't pleased when I chimed in that the two weren't quite the same. (I can guess which pays the bigger commission...)

I'm certain he could argue that the woman was using "iPhone" to mean "Smartphone" and he was pointing out that the two Smartphone OSes both have roughly the same feature set. But I'd bet that Tim Cook would feel that but for my intervention, she would have bought an Android "by mistake".

Somehow, I'm pretty certain that in the rental agreement on page 15, in small print, in paragraph 7 section 5 of the Terms of Service, it will have something that a lawyer could interpret as allowing this sort of behavior and the renters will sign.

Sure, if the students are annoyed enough, they might not come back next year, but the wonderful thing (from their perspective) is there's a whole new year of students to fleece.

Thinking on it, it's not textbooks that they should go after, it's pizza places. Try and reach any local pizza place, and you get transferred to Frank's pizza special page, which has a student special of only $3 more for pizzas ordered from that page :-).

They're not going to extract money from the sites with millions of visitors. They *may* be able to extract money from sites whose entire revenue generating visitors are college students, like textbook stores.

I doubt 15,000 students is enough, but it could get very "interesting" if they offered to funnel any visits to a competing text book site to the highest bidder.

Certainly a maximum evil model. You make paying for Internet access mandatory (i.e. include it in rent), and see how far you can push the students before they consider it worth-while to pay *again* for Internet access. I'm going to guess pretty far.

Your model is going out of business,

Indeed, it's true, there's probably not much that can stop the extinction of the paper book as a significant cultural and social phenomena. But for those of use who enjoy reading, and aren't really into cheap fan-fic, this isn't a cause for celebration.

I'm not really happy about trading 5-10 years of cheap fiction from authors established when we were willing to pay publishers for the discovery process for the opportunity to become a slush-pile reader myself. Once it becomes too much work to find interesting new authors, reading books for pleasure will die a slow death. It won't disappear entirely, of course. But it will be as relevant to the average person as poetry is now.

Luckily most e-readers play a decent game of Angry Birds.

Of course Amazon will probably make more money from selling listing fees and more importantly web presence than they currently do from selling books. After all, what's $10K to $20K to Amazon to promote your book when you've spent already $150K on a Master's of Creative Writing? And of course, once the traditional publishers are gone, I think we all understand that Amazon's royalties will drop like a stone. After all, they're not a charity.

PCI isn't the be-all and end-all, but I have to say that it's a set of metrics that a least prevent stores from assuming that everyone else is storing their PAN's in plaintext, etc.

I consider it like restaurant health inspections. Doesn't mean the restaurant can't poison you, but a lot less food poisoning occurs because of it.

I'm all in favor of security, but before we rip stores for bad security, I think we need to understand that many stores don't spend a fortune on security for the same reason we don't hire armed guards for our home. The cost simply isn't worth the decreased risk. And quite frankly, if we received a $100 bill for every credit card we owned to pay for that security, people would have a fit.

We'll get high security once the public is willing to pay for it, and not a moment sooner. Until that point, stores will only pay enough to avoid being especially vulnerable. After all, in crime, all that usually matters is not being the *weakest* link.

Wrong. Higher profits, not prices, attract higher quality authors. That's how you get them to quit their day job to focus on writing.

You are, of course, correct. However, as I mentioned before, we're not seeing any signs of new readers, nor are we seeing large increases in the number of books being bought per reader over the long-term.

In other words demand for books has shown itself to be (within limits) relatively price insensitive. Again, mostly because time is far more of a constraint than money. Evidence of this has been available for the last hundred years in the form of public libraries, which provide books for *free*, yet are not filled to the rafters with people desperate to read.

And yes, people are more willing to pick up a new series, but as I said, after the first 2-300 books on the "to-be-read' pile, the attraction of cheap books dims considerably and people back off adding any more, even at cheap prices. (The 400th app game that looks kind of interesting and is only a buck has the same problem getting downloaded.)

Of course, for my personal preferences, I take a double whammy. The type of book that has gone over well in the e-book world (and the ones that have been successful in e-only publishing) tend to be lighter books. And no wonder. A meaty book takes effort and concentration. It rewards those, but it does take the work. Unfortunately, most e-readers are also capable of playing games or videos at a touch, which makes doing the work about as easy as dieting in front of an open buffet.

The few e-only stars have mostly made it on lighter romance, pulpy thrillers, etc. I have no objection to the genre and enjoy the occasional one myself, but I do suspect that longer, deeper books that demand more of the reader are simply that much harder to read on an e-reader, which means fewer successes and a change as the new format dominates.

Again, a loss for me. Not much that can be done, except to mourn.

It's hard to predict the future, and certainly the publishers add some value to their products, but self-publishing is not going to kill the book industry.

No, I don't think it will. But I do think Amazon might, in the same sort of way that Walmart put an end to the American consumer good manufacturing industry. Except in this case, I don't think I'm going to be as happy with the price vs. quality trade-off...

Actually, if you pay attention to the self-publishing market, the primary problem is to get people to read the books at *any* price. People's time is money, and if 99% of the self-published books out there aren't even of "publishable" qualtiy (by current main-stream standards), then no-one is going to even try to read and evaluate the books. It simply isn't worth their time.

More than that, the general constraint on people's book purchases isn't money, it's time. Most people have time to read a dozen or so books a year. When prices drop, they can now expand their purchases to... a dozen books a year.

Now, the super-cheap books do tend to cause a big spurt of purchases at the beginning. But once people have 2-300 books in their unread pile, their purchase rates drop back to what they were before. Except instead of spending a few hundred dollars a year, if they're lucky, they can spend $50. That's not enough for publishers to survive.

Now it's true that known authors can self-publish, and actually make more money. But that's only if they've already been published by the mainstream press. For new self-published authors, it's incredibly hard. As a result, only a few dozen previously unpublished authors have made it to the "quit the day job" level, as opposed to the few thousand that join those ranks in traditional publishing each year.

Essentially, the discovery of new authors of reasonable quality is the seed corn of the industry. Without high enough prices, that process ends. Of course, the industry grinds on for quite some time, and no doubt people celebrate the odd author that does make it from obscurity. But unless you've got a decent sized pipeline, the industry is going to slowly die. Not with a bang, but with a "no, I gave up reading a while back - wasn't worth the hassle to find anything worth reading."

And yes, higher prices means a higher quality of entrant. Contrary to many people's opinion, authors are usually smart, educated people who actually have many options besides writing.

(And yes, with my previous hobbies, the people that were driving it forward and producing new goods left to do something that could pay the mortgage and feed their kids. The stores that were stocking the merchandise died, and that was the end of anyone new in the hobby. Within years, the hobbies were moribund. But yes, in both cases, there were cheap goods as we burned through our 'capital'.)

I don't know if it's a particular American thing, but boy do you see a lot of the sentiment of "people should be willing to work for nearly free for the privilege of serving me." Well, I'm telling you there's no free lunch. If it's not worth it to you to pay for quality, then it's not worth it for anyone else to produce quality.

This phenomena is also why large-scale paradigm shifts in a field only tend radiate outward from top universities. As a professor, you disseminate wholly new ideas via your graduate students, who then take positions at other universities and influence others.

It's pretty much impossible to fundamentally change minds once they're established in the field - after all, who wants to embrace something that makes much of their past work irrelevant?) So paradigm shifts tend to occur by seeding your graduate students into lots of different departments and waiting for the older generation to retire.

As for why hire from top universities? Well, that's easy. Given any field where there's lots of uncertainty, human beings naturally gravitate to any metric we can. And a PhD from a top university is about as solid a metric as one can get. Of course, it helps that the secondary metrics that are used (papers published, cited, etc.) are also established by editors and readers who also use the same metric to judge whether something is worth publishing or reading. Like so many things, we *make* in-built biases become truth by our actions.

Elitism and trust in the elites is a completely human reaction to uncertainty. Doesn't mean it's optimal, but it is human.