Slate : Will Improper Adaptation of E-Books Ruin Publishing Industry, as MP3s did the Music Industry?
Seeing the film, television, and publishing industries make the same mistakes as the music industry circa 1999 is both infuriating and saddening. I find myself marveling at industries who have yet to learn from the mistakes of a stubborn industry that branded its customers as criminals and prosecuted the very people who could have kept their industry alive, had they found a proper way to adapt to the changing market created by technological innovations.
Though it may seem as if the publishing industry today is a great distance away from the music industry of 1999, ask yourself how difficult it was to procure MP3s and play them on a quality, functional, and aesthetically pleasing music software before Napster? All it takes is one simple innovation and the entire industry can be headed for a tale spin. Rather than limiting the content and trying to control the market, publishers should be looking at the coming trends and technologies and find ways to at least be a part of the movement, if not ahead of the curb altogether. Rather than being another sad example of what happens when a legacy industry meets the digital future, the publishing industry should be finding ways to make itself the anti-music industry:
It doesn‘t make me a defender of illegal file-sharing to say that the music industry goofed by waiting until 2003 to agree to sell individual tracks for the reasonable price of 99 cents. Its absence from the electronic-music market in those early years allowed illegal file-sharing to take root and spread, and it helped shape the perception, especially among younger consumers, that music “should” be free.
So far, few consumers think books should be free—a fact that I attribute to the klugy Kindle and its affordable Amazon store. I conducted an informal census of friends and associates who read lots of books, and I found none who partake of the bootlegged variety. But that could change in a matter of months if the book industry insists on 1) jacking up the price of e-books and 2) withholding potential best-sellers from the e-book market. Cool devices that make electronic reading painless are just around the corner, and the e-book market is about to explode. If publishers insist on pushing prices too high and curbing availability, consumers could rebel—as they did with the sharing of MP3s—and normalize the trafficking of infringing e-books.
Does the Book Industry Want To Get Napstered? [Slate.com]