sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/its-not-the-rats-you-need-to-worry-about.html

“If you want to know if a ship is going to sink, watch what the richest passengers do.

iTunes and file sharing killed Tower Records. The key symptom: the best customers switched. Of course people who were buying 200 records a year would switch. They had the most incentive. The alternatives were cheaper and faster mostly for the heavy users.

Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever. The typical American buys just one book a year for pleasure. Those people are meaningless to a bookstore. It’s the heavy users that matter, and now officially, as 2009 ends, they have abandoned the bookstore. It’s over.

When law firms started switching to fax machines, Fedex realized that the cash cow part of their business (100 or 1000 or more envelopes per firm per day) was over and switched fast to packages. Good for them.

If your ship is sinking, get out now. By the time the rats start packing, it’s way too late.”

What does this say for libraries? That they have as much time as it takes for the Kindle (or a similar product) to get low enough in price that the average consumer sees it as preferable to hard copies of books. Maybe a decade?

I’m sure theres many reasons, but I bet one is that the retailers stand to make a killing if people convert to blue ray. So even though I – a consumer – don
t want blue ray – in the end – that’s all that will be available and I’ll get what I want.

Well as I recall, consumers shunned dvds until they begain getting hi-def tvs. Dvds offered so much better resolution that consumers began dropping vhs in droves. Consumer choice. Consumers also rejected SACD cds because of the price point at little perceived benefit over regular CDs.

Bluray is not taking off as predicted because consumers are happy with hi-def on-demand movies through their cable companies, and consumers are taking a serious look at the advantages of direct streaming of content over the internet.

In a free market, the consumer always gets his way in the end.

And from a library perspective are DVD’s any better? They certainly don’t hold up to 200 checkouts as well as a VHS would.

Just playing the Devil’s Advocate

Ah whatever. Go buy your kindle. Or your Blue-Ray. Or your Digital Downloadable. Whatever they tell you to do.

Sucker.

Wow, what a surprise. I think you made my point. Consumers rule. What you or Lessig or AL or the Pope thinks is best is pretty much irrelevant. It’s called consumer sovereignty. Look it up :)

Right. Consumers may end up latching on to one particular tech innovation over another for a number of reasons other than what is actually “best.” Look at VHS vs. Betamax or cassette tapes vs. LPs. People may choose what is cheaper, more easily available, more convenient, what has better marketing etc. over what might actually be preferable from a technical standpoint. If somebody invents an electronic reader that catches on like the Ipod, then that might be what we are stuck with even if it isn’t the “best” choice for lots of other reasons.

Mr. Lessig is a very smart man, but the average consumer doesn’t really know or care what he thinks.

RE: DRM and copyright law – I don’t know what the answer to this is. Many people (like Lessig) have proposed logical solutions, but those solutions depend on political power that we don’t have, thanks to every congressman being bought and paid for by big business.