Day: September 21, 2000

Stephen King’s E-Book Sales Slipping?

According to USA Today, the percentage of people who are paying for copies of Stephen King serialized novel The Plant are slipping — only(!) 70 percent of those downloading chapters of the novel are paying the $1/chapter.

First, $1/chapter is a bit pricey, except for the fact that King has said if he makes it to the 8th chapter, all subsequent chapters will be free. Eight dollars isn’t bad for a novel, but note that it’s probably more than you’d pay for the mass paperback version of a King novel.

Second, this illustrates the importance of expecations, and the bottom line is many intellectual property rights owners have unrealistic expectations of where the profitabilty of books and music are headed. Look at the bottom line — 172,004 people paid $1 for the first installment of the novel, and 74,373 paid $1 for the second installment. Assume that for the next six installment readership falls a bit and averages 50,000 paying customers per installment. That brings gross revenues from the venture to almost $550,000. Even assuming King has insanely high overhead costs of 50% of revenue, that’s still a profit of a cool quarter of a million dollars. I don’t know what King’s book contract looks like, but most people I know who want to be authors would be very happy to make $35,000 to $40,000 a year (the bottom line is that most books don’t sell, and writers don’t make much money unless they can sell in King-like numbers).

What the Internet will do is make it able for me or someone else to make the smaller levels of income independently of large publishers. For King and others in that upper stratosphere, however, they’re incomes will almost certainly fall (though some of them might be willing to accept that in exchange for the sort of control they have by selling their own work).

Death to Radio

This CNN story reports that radio is threatened by advances in technology. Thank goodness.

In August my wife and I drove from Michigan through Ohio and Kentucky to a wedding in Tennessee. Wherever we went our radio choices boiled down to a) boy band pop stations, b) classic rock, c) soft rock/80s format, or d) pop country. Yuck.

When I drove to Chicago with a friend in July, the rental car had a CD player and the only time we switched to the radio was for traffic and weather updates.

Maybe if micro-power stations ever actually go life, there might be something worth listening to on the radio, but I find radio to be so bad I don’t even actually have a radio at home. I’d never use it.

Book Industry to Lose Billions – Who Cares?

According to this Infoworld story, the publishing industry is about to find itself in the same situation as the music industry. Hopefully it will have a better response than the record companies’ “the customer is our enemy” mantra.

On the other hand, as with digital music industry it’s hard for me to get all worked up about the billions of dollars the publishing companies stand to lose.

Look, throughout history technological progress has led to an overall decline in the costs of goods. Why should intellectual property be any different? The problem the book industry and music industry is going through now is exactly the same as the other industries have gone through.

The problem the book industry is going to have is that I’d much rather pay $7.50 direct to an author for an electronic version of his book than $27.95 in a bookstore for a hard copy version, especially since a book in electronic form can do things that would be prohibitively expensive in print (there’s a reason, for example, that most illustrations and diagrams in books are strictly black and white — color’s extremely expensive in print, but basically free in electronic form).

The only industry that’s really adapted to this sort of cycle of declining costs and improved performance is the computer industry. Imagine somebody today coming out with a 486 PC with a 14″ monitor and expecting you to pay $1,500 for it. After you finished laughing, you’d probably question the mental health of the outfit behind such an offer.

But this is precisely what the record companies and publishing companies think they can do — offer yesterday’s products at today’s prices. That’s why they won’t succeed.

Music Industry to Hackers: Do Our Dirty Work For Us

Infoworld has an article on the SDMI initiative — the music industry’s last best hope for stopping the MP3 bandwagon —Digital music initiative nearly ready. The only thing you need to know about SDMI, however, is this:

Not only that, but there are many consumer issues which have yet to be resolved, Reed said. SDMI, as currently composed, would not allow the playing of existing MP3 files on SDMI-compliant players. This will be difficult for consumers to accept, he said, because they already have music libraries that they will want to listen to.

Okay, I am not a psychic or anything but I think it’s a pretty safe prediction that a digital music player that ships without being able to play MP3s is dead in the water. Can you imagine if the first Walkman didn’t play cassettes, because they can be copied, but instead played some alternative tape format? It never would have sold.

In fact the market clearly rejected this sort of model with the failure of the DivX DVD format. One of the “features” of the DivX format was that it had an extraordinarily secure digital rights management scheme — once you paid the money to activate it, the DivX DVD could be played only in the original machine. Want to loan it to a friend? Too bad, so sad (it still boggles my mind that Circuit City actually thought this technology would be embraced by consumers given its overwhelming number of drawbacks).

The music industry really has only one option to stop MP3 outright, which would be suicide — stop selling CDs, right now, and force people to switch to a secure format. Otherwise they’re just wasting a lot of time and energy on schemes that are not going to work and will only further the perception that the music industry sees its customers as its biggest enemy.

Brian Gets Upgraded

Yesterday I spent much of the late-afternoon and evening buying and then setting up a new computer. I operate on the Moore’s Law principle — every 18 months I need a new computer that is at least twice as fast as my “old” computer, at the same price.

This time around it took a lot less than 18 months. I replaced my underperforming 450mhz PIII with its lowly 17 gig hard drive with an Athlon 900mhz machine with a 45 gig hard drive. The only areas I skimped on performance were going with 128mb RAM rather than 256 — have to add that later. I also installed an ATI 32mb All-In-Wonder rather than the $350 GE Force card I’d been wanting. The appeal of moderate 3D acceleration along with the audio/video in/out options on the ATI was too much to pass up for only $100. I’ve just got to route my cable wire up to my den so I can start recording Babylon 5 when it hits the SciFi channel starting Monday (subjectively, btw, I seem to be getting 3D frame rates at 1,024 x 768 on the ATI card that I was getting from my TNT2/32 at 800 x 600 which is more than adequate for my 3D needs).

I also added a 19-inch Trinitron monitor, which was a big improvement over the bottom of the barrel 17″ monitor I’d been using.