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> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never payin

> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. > How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators and towards running the actual infrastructure to download/consume media? If you look beyond the big players you'll find some people earn more (semi-)self-publishing on the internet than they'd have ever earned with a publishing deal. On-demand/low volume print and having digital as your default channel also made "real" publishing deals available to more people. Being on store shelves was not actually that much better than Spotify for musicians accounting for volume, they just had less competition because now shelf space is unlimited.

scrollaway 6y ago
> You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. To be honest this is a really great point I've seen brought up very rarely. I think the digital aspect makes it so extremely obvious that it forced the conversation. That said, there are more costs than the physical medium itself. There's the physical shelf space copies consumes (vs. digital media which can be copied on demand), the costs associated with the creation and shipping of the item, in-store human handling, not to mention all the consumer-level effort and costs of purchasing the physical media (going to the store and carrying it around, having it occupy space at home, taking care of not damaging it…)
- sascha_sl 6y ago
  These things all still exist in some capacity, though obviously it has become more efficient. Bandwidth isn't free, for instance. The cost of publishing hasn't changed much. It just shifted from "making it to the limited selection" to "being visible in the essentially limitless selection". In the end you still need to make deals with retailers and invest into advertising (especially when storefronts don't do deals - or at least say they don't, hi spotify).
soperj 6y ago
>This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. Except you're not renting books or optical media. You're buying them, and you can resell them or loan them to other people no problem.
- jonhohle 6y ago
  For collectors or even casual consumers, this secondary market has as much or more value than the primary market. My wife and son borrow an absurd amount of library books. I maintain a library of movies and games, most of which are second hand. And if I don’t like something, it goes back into the market for someone else to enjoy. There’s depreciation and an ultimate limit to how many times something can be lent, which only exists artificially in the digital world (libraries get so many “lends” of a digital license before they have to buy another). On the other hand, for end users, digital licenses are completely missing lending and selling and in some cases even backup and format shifting. Has the first sale doctrine ever been applied to these licenses in court?
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
But with a book, you have that privilege in perpetuity, and you can loan, transfer, and resell it. Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.
- sascha_sl 6y ago
  Well, I was hinting at smaller digital storefronts! Many of them do offer DRM free digital books. I can't comment on NFTs beyond "wow, what a wasteful scam".
- MereInterest 6y ago
  > Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide. Exactly! This is the part that I cannot get past whenever people talk about NFTs. They are a neat toy, self-contained, and having unambiguous ownership of the NFT. But there is absolutely nothing in the real world connected to it. It's like those pie-in-the-sky physics models that have hundreds of free parameters unconstrained by any experimental measurement. Sure those models might make some interesting predictions, but they have nothing tying them to the real world. I could imagine a system where NFTs are used to establish ownership, but that requires there to be some trusted source that signs the initial NFT. This could be a land surveyor to make a NFT that represents property borders, or a patent office to make a NFT that represents a granted patent, or a MMO video game company to make a NFT that represents a particular asset within the game. But as it is, J.K. Rowling could make a NFT representing "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", and I could make one as well. There's no indication of which one is a valid link from mathematical space to real space. NFTs need a legal system in order to tie them to anything outside of the NFT ecosystem. They need trusted authorities who are the only ones that can generate NFTs with specific legal authority. And once you have that trusted authority, there's no point in having any of the other trustless blockchain architecture whose sole, flimsy excuse for existing is in avoiding having a trusted authority in the first place. (Sorry, that turned into a longer rant than I had expected, but your phrasing crystallized some ideas that had been floating around my head, and I wanted to write them out to see where they went.)
crazygringo 6y ago
> You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. It's true the physical book manufacturing is only ~10% of the price. But you're forgetting costs of shipping, warehousing, stocking, retail, etc. Separate from manufacturing, roughly 40% of what you pay for a book goes to the physical retailer, and that's actually the largest chunk. When you add up all the costs of producing and transporting and selling the physical book to a customer (and the publisher taking back unsold copies), they make up the majority of a book's cost. The actual "license of content" cost of a physical book is a minority of the price you pay.
colllectorof 6y ago
>> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. >This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. When I pay for a book in a bookstore, part of the money goes towards maintaining the system that produces and distributes books. The system includes various parties, like printers, publishers, distributors, books stores and so on. It's far more than 10% and there is nothing wrong with paying for a reasonably working distributed system like that. Replacing all of those companies with a single megacorp like Amazon or Apple is not going to result in the same system running cheaper. It will create an entirely different system. Over time that new system will shift to publish entirely different type of content, it will have an entirely different relationship with consumers and authors and it will have completely different effect on the society at large. Given what I see already, I seriously doubt those changes will skew towards the positive.
- 6510 6y ago
  > It will create an entirely different system. Simple as that sounds I didn't think of it before. It seems that if all the old systems can/might/will be replaced by the mega corp we could simply set a modest fixed megacorp-tax of say 1-2% and have the rest go to the creator of the text or video. It was the author who provided the excuse in the old system why we should pay for easily replicated data. The argument that we should pay to be able to find the data was never a thing. It might as well be but it isn't. We can generously give this party 1% for the great effort they made finding the product I wanted to purchase. (The author should probably pay the megacorp for hosting and bandwidth) After all, the mega corp is our hostage first and we are theirs second.
  - vineyardmike 6y ago
    > we could simply set a modest fixed megacorp-tax of say 1-2% Yeah this will surely be more like 30%
  - Tostino 6y ago
    Only possible if the power dynamic somehow shifts in a significant way. Maybe it will, but I'm not very optimistic.

scrollaway 6y ago

> You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. To be honest this is a really great point I've seen brought up very rarely. I think the digital aspect makes it so extremely obvious that it forced the conversation. That said, there are more costs than the physical medium itself. There's the physical shelf space copies consumes (vs. digital media which can be copied on demand), the costs associated with the creation and shipping of the item, in-store human handling, not to mention all the consumer-level effort and costs of purchasing the physical media (going to the store and carrying it around, having it occupy space at home, taking care of not damaging it…)

sascha_sl 6y ago
These things all still exist in some capacity, though obviously it has become more efficient. Bandwidth isn't free, for instance. The cost of publishing hasn't changed much. It just shifted from "making it to the limited selection" to "being visible in the essentially limitless selection". In the end you still need to make deals with retailers and invest into advertising (especially when storefronts don't do deals - or at least say they don't, hi spotify).

soperj 6y ago

>This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. Except you're not renting books or optical media. You're buying them, and you can resell them or loan them to other people no problem.

jonhohle 6y ago
For collectors or even casual consumers, this secondary market has as much or more value than the primary market. My wife and son borrow an absurd amount of library books. I maintain a library of movies and games, most of which are second hand. And if I don’t like something, it goes back into the market for someone else to enjoy. There’s depreciation and an ultimate limit to how many times something can be lent, which only exists artificially in the digital world (libraries get so many “lends” of a digital license before they have to buy another). On the other hand, for end users, digital licenses are completely missing lending and selling and in some cases even backup and format shifting. Has the first sale doctrine ever been applied to these licenses in court?

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

But with a book, you have that privilege in perpetuity, and you can loan, transfer, and resell it. Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.

sascha_sl 6y ago
Well, I was hinting at smaller digital storefronts! Many of them do offer DRM free digital books. I can't comment on NFTs beyond "wow, what a wasteful scam".
MereInterest 6y ago
> Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide. Exactly! This is the part that I cannot get past whenever people talk about NFTs. They are a neat toy, self-contained, and having unambiguous ownership of the NFT. But there is absolutely nothing in the real world connected to it. It's like those pie-in-the-sky physics models that have hundreds of free parameters unconstrained by any experimental measurement. Sure those models might make some interesting predictions, but they have nothing tying them to the real world. I could imagine a system where NFTs are used to establish ownership, but that requires there to be some trusted source that signs the initial NFT. This could be a land surveyor to make a NFT that represents property borders, or a patent office to make a NFT that represents a granted patent, or a MMO video game company to make a NFT that represents a particular asset within the game. But as it is, J.K. Rowling could make a NFT representing "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", and I could make one as well. There's no indication of which one is a valid link from mathematical space to real space. NFTs need a legal system in order to tie them to anything outside of the NFT ecosystem. They need trusted authorities who are the only ones that can generate NFTs with specific legal authority. And once you have that trusted authority, there's no point in having any of the other trustless blockchain architecture whose sole, flimsy excuse for existing is in avoiding having a trusted authority in the first place. (Sorry, that turned into a longer rant than I had expected, but your phrasing crystallized some ideas that had been floating around my head, and I wanted to write them out to see where they went.)

crazygringo 6y ago

> You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. It's true the physical book manufacturing is only ~10% of the price. But you're forgetting costs of shipping, warehousing, stocking, retail, etc. Separate from manufacturing, roughly 40% of what you pay for a book goes to the physical retailer, and that's actually the largest chunk. When you add up all the costs of producing and transporting and selling the physical book to a customer (and the publisher taking back unsold copies), they make up the majority of a book's cost. The actual "license of content" cost of a physical book is a minority of the price you pay.

colllectorof 6y ago

>> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. >This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. When I pay for a book in a bookstore, part of the money goes towards maintaining the system that produces and distributes books. The system includes various parties, like printers, publishers, distributors, books stores and so on. It's far more than 10% and there is nothing wrong with paying for a reasonably working distributed system like that. Replacing all of those companies with a single megacorp like Amazon or Apple is not going to result in the same system running cheaper. It will create an entirely different system. Over time that new system will shift to publish entirely different type of content, it will have an entirely different relationship with consumers and authors and it will have completely different effect on the society at large. Given what I see already, I seriously doubt those changes will skew towards the positive.

6510 6y ago
> It will create an entirely different system. Simple as that sounds I didn't think of it before. It seems that if all the old systems can/might/will be replaced by the mega corp we could simply set a modest fixed megacorp-tax of say 1-2% and have the rest go to the creator of the text or video. It was the author who provided the excuse in the old system why we should pay for easily replicated data. The argument that we should pay to be able to find the data was never a thing. It might as well be but it isn't. We can generously give this party 1% for the great effort they made finding the product I wanted to purchase. (The author should probably pay the megacorp for hosting and bandwidth) After all, the mega corp is our hostage first and we are theirs second.
- vineyardmike 6y ago
  > we could simply set a modest fixed megacorp-tax of say 1-2% Yeah this will surely be more like 30%
- Tostino 6y ago
  Only possible if the power dynamic somehow shifts in a significant way. Maybe it will, but I'm not very optimistic.