And they’ve been able to control this layered cost-of-access because they completely control the supply of the buckets… they decide when it’s time to make a mass-market bucket.

The thing I find really funny about that is that the *consumer* doesn’t seem to have figured this out until ebooks hit public notice. Suddenly, they realize that the cost of producing an ebook should be no more than the cost of the mass-market paperback. The consumer tends to think that the barrier of high-cost book production has been removed… when the cost of book production was never the real issue.

What’s also interesting to me is the realization of how much the fiction market *depends* on early adopters paying a premium to have it now, instead of six months or a year from now. How can they adapt when digital content makes piracy an easy alternative to paying a premium price?

Locking content up in tighter and tighter controls is not the answer. They’ve been trying to stop copying with various copy-protection schemes since I bought my Apple IIe back in the mid-1980’s. You think they’d have figured out that in over 25 years of DRM, it doesn’t stop copying and just annoys the legitimate customers.

print cartoonists: Our livelihoods are disappearing! It’s impossible to make a living on the internet.

web cartoonists: Sure you can. Many of us do. You just have to bust your ass and be your own publicist, advertising team, merchandising group, and everything else.

print cartoonists: I just want to draw cartoons and get paid for it!

I’m sympathetic to both sides, but I think the web cartoonists are right. Like it or not, this is the future.

It’s the same way with the consoles. One buys an Xbox360 to play Orange Box. One does not get Orange Box to facilitate an Xbox360. You say, “Gee, I would like to play Portal” and you get yourself a system. Portal sells Xboxes, the Xbox does not sell portal.

I dunno. Microsoft’s products are substandard where they are a virtual monopoly but pretty good where they have healthy competition (hardware accessories, games). This seems like a petulant pout at the Apple Store on Microsoft’s part.

So all I wanted to say was I definitely have to read this book.

–Kim