Hi, Haven't written for awhile, but have been reading all the discussion lately.
Ran across this (pretty harsh, but real) article linked from my favorite blog: "It¹s not a question of entitlement. It¹s a question of clear vision about the inevitability of painful, weird change, and whether we can each find the courage to face it without folding. If anyone¹s acting ³entitled² right now, it¹s the many publishing companies who are perfectly happy to leverage every conceivable economy of scale on the internet (free marketing, free distribution, free testimonials, orders-of-magnitude growth opportunities etc.) but, then somehow find the monarch-sized stones to piss and moan about how they can¹t make money off of it as fast as they¹d prefer. Hard cheese, guys. Join the club. If you follow your customers, you¹ll follow the money. If you follow the medium, you follow the traffic. But, if you follow nothing but your own deranged preferences about controlling every aspect of how your material is consumed and paid for, you might as well dust off your resume and sharpen your spatula. Here¹s my point: businesses don¹t get to pick the timetable for when their preferred model takes a permanent dirt nap. It¹s insane to me that these businesses¹ fans see this so much more clearly than their actual stakeholders do. The fans want desperately to see these places stay alive, and many, like me, pay tons of actual cash every month or year to support that. But, then we also find ourselves having to beg them to face the non-negotiable reality of a scary, complicated, and hard-to-monetize new environment where nobody cares how attached you are to your spreadsheet. Bravely vowing to continue pretending it¹s 1972 is a terrific treatment for a film, but it¹s a crap way to run your growing business. To me, all this is hardly any sign of a greedy or skinflint consumer. ³Entitlement?² Please. More like a last-ditch intervention from the rapidly shrinking number of folks who actually care. They¹ll keep reading and buying something for decades after these dinosaurs are on their way to fossils." <http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/439434786/entitled-to-care> Best, Rick Faaberg NWRESD Regional Director of Multimedia Services, Retired VIDEOLIB is intended to encourage the broad and lively discussion of issues relating to the selection, evaluation, acquisition,bibliographic control, preservation, and use of current and evolving video formats in libraries and related institutions. It is hoped that the list will serve as an effective working tool for video librarians, as well as a channel of communication between libraries,educational institutions, and video producers and distributors.
