On Wed, 2010-11-10 at 18:28 +0000, Will Bickerstaff wrote: > > > On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Glen Mehn <[email protected]> > wrote: > <snip> > The bank analogy doesn't exactly make sense as banks are > replacing > something expensive for them (employees, time, and physical > space) with > something very scalable and well-understood (web apps). Books > switching > to ebook is replacing something well-understood and dirt cheap > (printing/distribution) with something not so well understood > (three > major competing formats, a dizzying array of DRM options or > not, > personal fears in a declining industry, no standard) > > > So a second hand 10 year old half decent machine is going to set us > back circa £250,000 (Not cheap). Believe it or not, the equipment is > actually going to need to occupy some physical space. Likewise our > finished products are also going to need to occupy physical space > until they are distributed. Space is space, whether you a bank or a > printer, in fact as a printer your probably going to need more than a > bank. Then we have energy use, some 33kW, Maintenance Work and > operators, so there's your employees and time which I don't think > materially differ too much from banks either. There's also a ton of > other work that you'd need to account for whether it be another energy > consumer or direct labour, think loading/unloading materials packaging > for despatch, order taking and processing staff facilities etc. So > actually, I think the bank analogy works very well. In my opinion, > there are probably bigger savings for printers than banks.
I don't think I fully agree with you. As far as the bank is concerned, whether you go through a branch or the internet, you are still using the same services and they are still making money the same way, by basically allowing you to store your own money in their bank accounts or by lending you money. Money is already a line item in a database so what internet means for them is the ability to present those line items online rather than on a piece of paper. They can therefore streamline those processes and use less resources to deliver them but in essence they don't change their business model. For a publisher, the traditional business model is based on acquiring the rights to reproduce a text, producing physical items out of this text, shifting those books to distributors and selling the physical objects. Most of the cost is in the distribution and the value is in the physical object so that's what you pay for. Switching to digital means that this business model doesn't work anymore because the distribution and copy become very cheap and anybody can do it, not just them. So the value no longer is in the distribution and a physical product, it is in the artistic creation performed by the author and they don't know how to monetise that. So in order to keep the same business model, they have to artificially restrict the ability to distribute and copy by using DRM. In addition to this, it means a major change in how they produce the book: they have to retrofit a digital workflow on top of a traditional industrial workflow. So yes there are some potential cost savings but there is also a massive change in business model and that's where they have a problem. Cheers, Bruno -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
