I’m supposed to be prepping for a mini road trip to San Diego in two days (making a return appearance at Comic-Con on behalf of Runes of Gallidon), but I can’t resist writing this before heading out of town.
I just cleaned out my RSS reader, twitter, and Friendfeed updates, and I was struck – once again – at the number of examples of how analog product is shifting towards a status of antiques. I define an analog offering as a physical object containing digitized or digitizable content (a book, a CD, a DVD, etc.).
Notably, Mike Masnick at techdirt.com posted about applying his recent experiement in applying his “CwF + RtB = $$$” formula to a series of offerings from Techdirt.
I seriously considered dropping $150 for the Techdirt Book Club just to get a signed copy of James Boyle’s The Public Domain.
Here’s the madness about that statement: I ALREADY OWN A COPY! It’s unsigned, but aside from the signature, it’s an exact copy of what I already have.
I’m a firm believer that as digital content shifts to a role of pure advertising for analog offerings, the appeal of analog offerings will look more like that of an antique collector’s assessment of their treasure trove. Sure, there are lots of things that work better (though one might bicker about the definition of “better”) than an 1940’s telephone, but there’s a uniqueness of the antique phone that can’t be replicated. An authenticity, if you will.And some people value owning a 1940’s telephone, even if it’s not functional.
I could read lots of content for free online, but I honestly don’t see ereaders as representing the death knell for paper books. The sale of paper books will likely decline over time, but they’re not going away permanently (personally, I suspect a new form/view of packaging the content of traditional books will evolve along the lines that consumers can print up their own books/magazines/anthologies using lots of digital content from various sources in the ultimate mass customization offering – some of this technology is already emerging, actually).
Heck, given the Kindle’s limitations (most recently a predilection to behave like a petulant adolescent who’s regretted a toy trade and decided to invoke a unilateral “do-over”), the only thing that’s clear at the moment is that ereaders are not growing as fast as anyone hoped/predicted/feared.
But let’s say ereaders are all the rage. Would I ask Cory Doctorow to sign my Kindle? Okay, bad example, but would I value a signed copy of one of his books more than a signed copy of the Kindle? Absolutely. And how many author’s signatures could I collect on my Kindle before it becomes unusable in its original form, thus becoming (gasp!) an antique itself.
When the content in an analog offering can be consumed digitally through another medium, channel, or experience, what’s left is the physical, analog properties of the analog offering that can’t be digitized.
LP’s are still selling, plenty of authors are selling paper books even when they offer their books online for free, heck, Cheap Trick just announced they’re releasing a new album on the 8-Track platform. Wonder how that pitch went…
“Hey guys, I know we’re old as dirt as far as the music industry is concerned, but let’s release a new album on a technology decades old that almost no one even has anymore and charge 50% more than a typical CD and make it a bundled set of content that gives the purchaser no choice in deciding what songs they want and which ones they don’t want. Who’s in?” [note: they’re also releasing it traditionally as a CD]
It’s too early to tell how much this might make them as far as revenue is concerned, but it’s certainly hitting all the marks of Masnick’s formula.
When content becomes free advertising, analog products look more like antique offerings. And that’s not bad, it’s just different.