5 ms·
That’s not how this marketplace works at all. A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs, yet they are still forced to compete with Porsc
by c0pium 3y ago
That’s not how this marketplace works at all. A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs, yet they are still forced to compete with Porsche, who has their own monopoly on creating Porsches.
There’s a two-sided marketplace for creative works, where publishers need to get works from creators and license them to customers. They want to maximize their own profits, but they also need to make a certain amount revenue as all methods of distribution have fixed costs.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago> A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs BMW is a trademark. You can't take a Kia and put a BMW badge on it. You can, in principle, make an exact replica of a particular BMW model and put your own badge on it, and in that sense BMW doesn't have a monopoly on "BMWs" except insofar as some of the parts may be patented or (for the software) copyrighted. But that isn't an analogy, it's the original thing. Notice what happens when you take the original thing (intellectual property) out of the equation, your statement becomes "Bayer has a monopoly on aspirin", which they don't, because the Aspirin trademark became generic and it's not under patent.
- c0pium 3y agoFirst, BMW has thousands of patents. They also have trademarks, copyrights, and trade secret manufacturing processes. Second, if you make a non-BMW you can’t legally sell it as a BMW or you’re committing fraud. Third, most of the reason that people buy luxury brands like BMW is actually because of the cachet that the name has, so even if you could make an identical one in Prussia and call it a PMW, it would be a different and less valuable thing. All of which is a long winded way of saying, BMW are the only ones who can make BMWs. Thus they have a monopoly on making BMWs. Taking intellectual property out of a conversation about intellectual property has predictably strange and totally irrelevant results. Why is that surprising?
- llm_trw 3y agoGiven that book prices are rising faster than _anything else in the economy_ the market place isn't working at all. Let them eat competition.
- c0pium 3y agoHuh? In the United States books have inflated by -0.1% per year since 1997, compared with the overall economy which inflated at 2.46% per year on average during the same period. Because of the stiff competition. Unless you mean specifically textbooks, which are inflating because piracy has destroyed the demand (the annual revenue of the textbook market is down ~33% since 2014, despite increases in both prices and enrollment in colleges). You can see the causal link here as increases in pricing are lagging decreasing sales. If the prices were driving the decreasing sales you would expect the opposite behavior.
- llm_trw 3y agoWhy start at 2014? https://archive.attn.com/stories/1164/heres-exactly-why-college-textbooks-are-so-expensive https://archive.attn.com/stories/1164/heres-exactly-why-coll... Between 1975 and 2014 college books outpaced inflation over three times.
- c0pium 3y agoYou should look at that chart a bit more carefully.