Digital distribution versus physical distribution

It's clear that more and more things - books, movies, games, music - are going digital rather than physical. There's pros and cons to both. Two people separately told me they don't like books, and video games, going digital-only - with one of them, a very old-school gamer, saying that the day video games go digital-only is the day he stops playing.

Digital means lower production costs, not having to ship things to a store and take back unsold inventory, and never having to run out of physical copies. It benefits small-time developers in a huge way, allowing them to much more easily break into a market.

Physical means having a copy you can keep no matter what. The Zune, for example, died and took all its music with it. The Kindle might one day do the same, or Steam as well. Currently I trust those devices (I bought a book on Kindle and read it exclusively digitally), but in the future, customers could be screwed.

Digital kills the secondhand market. No borrowing or lending. No rentals (although some companies are changing this, such as Nintendo allowing $2 daily rentals of Wii Sports Club on the Wii U). Rental outlets would make money per rental while the company that made the rented product would receive money only once for the initial purchase. If companies allow rentals of their digital products, they could get more money directed straight to them.

I could go on forever, but I'd rather see more opinions. What do you guys think of digital versus physical distribution?

I'm opening this thread on the caveat that we obey one of our primary rules: discussions of piracy as anything other than a competitive/economic phenomenon are forbidden. That is, no bragging about how you "beat Teh Man" by stealing someone's work, no talking about how to obtain pirated material, and no justifying piracy on the basis of "Copyright Sux" or "IP owners are jerkfaces".

edited 16th Oct '13 1:34:26 PM by Fighteer

The Kindle and Digitial publishing has killed normal books. However, I think that books are going to evolve into stuff like a awesome kick starter reward. this podcast explains what I mean

edited 16th Oct '13 1:35:38 PM by Soban

Interesting. I actually hadn't even considered that positive portrayals of piracy would even occur in this thread. I was thinking only in terms of legal digital, e.g. purchasing from online stores, etc.

Any discussion of content distribution invariably devolves into a piracy versus anti-piracy debate unless curtailed. It's one of the Forum Laws.

As for books, yes, digital distribution is what's killed off mainstream bookstores. It was already a declining business, but as soon as someone figured out that you can put a book on a computer and read it there, Barnes & Noble and its buddies were doomed. Same thing with record stores and digital music, and video rental and Netflix/Hulu/Redbox/etc.

The only reason video stores still exist is that movies are too large to conveniently download for most people.

edited 16th Oct '13 1:41:33 PM by Fighteer

Cross-posting the relevant bits from the other economics thread:

1) That's what I just said (by logic of digital distribution allowing "indie" writing), and 2) I'm going to guess you don't pay much attention to the book market these days, given how you dismissed all "indie" work as fan fiction.

To clarify, "indie" in this case means it skips the concept of a publisher, a middleman - the creator publishes the work directly themselves.

edited 16th Oct '13 1:42:48 PM by TotemicHero

I don't pay a lot of attention to book publishing. Prior to digital distribution, the hurdle to getting your work sold was getting shelf space in a physical retailer. I have not explored the e-book market to any great degree, but my experience of it is that you have the same selection online that you do in print, except that nothing ever goes out of print.

There's a digital marketplace for books that's still roughly equivalent to a store front. I mean, sure, anyone can export a Word document to PDF and put it up on a website somewhere, but for mass market stuff, you're talking Amazon, B&N, and other major web stores, and you still have to go through a publishing contract of sorts for that.

Frankly, I've never heard of "indie" books making it big without support from a retailer.

edited 16th Oct '13 1:55:43 PM by Fighteer

I wish book companies would put their entire back catalogs in ebook form. For example, Pyrates isn't and wasn't popular, and the only way to get it is in physical form. I like the convenience of being able to take my digital everything with me, and I'd hate for this book series to be unobtainable.

Self-Publishing has really taken off recently. Like, now you can publish directly to the Kindle or Kobo e-stores without having to worry about publishers or physical space or anything.

Physical publishers require you to go through an agent mostly, and Canada only has like 15 for the whole country. They tend to be a little overbooked.

Yeah, I'd love it if Roger Zelzany's output was put on digital devices. Instead I need to haul the brick that is the Great Book of Amber around.

They should also put textbooks on there more often. The physical books are ripoffs. It should not be 200$ for a book where the only changes from last year's edition were three paragraphs getting switched around. Especially not when other publishers have books that are the same size and quality for less than 50$.

edited 16th Oct '13 1:47:47 PM by Zendervai

Baen books for a long time put all of their books in free digital form in C Ds on their books. Interestingly, Mercedes Lacky saw a boost in her physical book sales when she put the book on the CD.

edited 16th Oct '13 1:46:23 PM by Soban

A lot of writers these days publish e-books and only e-books. There are also types of printed books that don't work as e-books (mainly because image files are data hogs, meaning you can't include too many pictures in an e-book).

As for not having heard of indie books having become big, well, I give you...

edited 16th Oct '13 1:47:23 PM by TotemicHero

Personally, I prefer having physical copies so that I have something tangible to handle.

For instance, I didn't buy any digital academic material unless it was required for online assignments, because oftentimes I don't have as much control over it. A physical book I can choose to keep as reference, or sell it back to recoup some of the cost. With digital books, I usually have a fixed-time subscription to access, so I don't have that choice.

I just buy off Kindle. It gets saved to the device of your choice.

There is more permanence to a digital copy than there can ever possibly be to a physical book. There is certainly the issue of rights, formats, who stores it, and so forth, but there are projects out there to deal with that.

When you can store entire bookshelves on a device with the footprint of a single medium-sized paperback, it's time to save those trees. My only concern is the cost of replacing all my books with electronic versions. If there were some way one could transfer those rights — "trade in" your physical books rather than have to buy all new versions — I'd be on it in a heartbeat.

As it is, it could cost me thousands of dollars to get digital copies of everything on my shelves.

You may think your saving trees. But running computer servers and kindles does take up power and energy.

I don't know anyone has the numbers.

edited 16th Oct '13 2:25:41 PM by joeyjojo

That falls apart when you consider that a lot of those computers are going to be running anyway, and the power needed to power a kindle is pretty insignificant.

Really, the economics are pretty straightforward. Paper is a hugely inefficient way to store information. Otherwise, why is digital distribution destroying bookstores, record stores, video stores...?

Probably even video game stores, eventually, given how easy it is to buy games online. I haven't bought a boxed copy of a PC game in years — the last one was, I believe, the Collector's Edition of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

edited 16th Oct '13 2:31:42 PM by Fighteer

Tell me if this is appropriate to say:

I don't like the idea of people selling licenses instead of property as most ebooks have been doing with DRM. I would like to not have to lock into a certain device when choosing what to read on.

I also don't think that removing DRM would destroy the market. Apple removing DRM from its songs has not destroyed iTunes. There is some research out there showing that $2.99 is the optimum price for an ebook, as at this point a book becomes a guilt-free impulse buy so the seller can sell much more of them. I don't have a quote on this but it seems like piracy is less common with things priced as impulse buys, as what has happened with individual songs. At a certain point it's less effort to just buy what you want than find a pirated version.

Records and videos aren't even paper, though...

I guess it's simply because digital production is easier to do by a smaller group or individual.

It's kind of ironic that digitally distributed content may have a lot of built-in restrictions, despite how a major selling point is it being open and easily recopied.

edited 16th Oct '13 2:34:23 PM by Trivialis

I've always been a fan of Physical distribution. I hate the fact that I can't get an actual physical copy of many games these days. Books, I don't have a kindle and I don't want one. When I buy a book it's because I want to get away from electronics and just read. I much prefer actually holding a real book, theres just a...thing to it. I dunno but I prefer it.

That falls apart when you consider that a lot of those computers are going to be running anyway, and the power needed to power a kindle is pretty insignificant.

And those trees were still going to be chop down. It's just now their pulp is being sold to a tampon factory and not a printers.

I tend to feel like the people who rode horse and buggy carriages felt similarly about how it was increasingly impossible for them to keep said buggy operational when they had to worry about automobiles.

@ Trivialis: Not that it's all going in the same direction — aren't vinyl records undergoing a renaissance in some quarters at the moment?

I think that video games our generations L Ps in away. People have more of a emotional investment in a work of art if they own a physical copy.

Most of the books I read now are (legal) free copies. Piracy is mostly a problem for big, popular things that everyone wants to see. I think as the market decentralizes it will become even less of a problem.

The biggest problem I see with the ebook/digital market is that people will get left behind, primarily people who have shoddy internet connections or people who can only afford resale entertainment stuff. I guess it's not really in the producer's best interest to think about those people, though.