from Seth Goding at the Domino Project (http://www.thedominoproject.com/2011/12/how-the-long-tail-cripples-bonus-contentmultimedia.html):
"Phil Simon sent along this interview with the head of Ingram books.
It’s filled with breathtaking visions of the future, and they are economically ridiculous.
The Long Tail creates acres of choice, so much as to make the number of options almost countless.
But at the same time, it embraces (in every format) much lower production values.
For what Michael Jackson and Sony paid to produce the Thriller album, today’s artists can make and market more than 5,000 songs.
You just can’t justify spending millions of dollars to produce a record in the long tail world.
[The only reason that movies still cost so much to make is the finite number of movie screens available to the studios (this choke point enforces the scarcity of the short head). Once the world is 100% Netflix, don't expect to see many more $200 million movies.]
...The quality is going to remain in the writing and in the bravery of ideas, not in teams of people making expensive digital books.
The market didn’t really make a conscious choice here, but the choice has been made: it’s not a few publishers putting out a few books for the masses.
No, the market for the foreseeable future is a million publishers publishing to 100 million readers.
Do the math. Lots of choice, not a lot of whistles. And no bells."
Must read: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-m-rubin/how-will-we-read-the-book_1_b_1163455.html