Someone mentioned "creator-perspective" about digital versus physical distribution.
These days, the issue is that digital is just way more convenient and no evidence points to digital sales harming physical sales. The thing is for digital sales:
- They are super convenient
- An epublication of a comic or a song can be transferred to different hardware at a buyer's convenience
- No chance of losing the product you purchased by accident
There's talk about loss of second-hand market and so on. You want the creator's perspective? There's essentially no difference between piracy and a second-sale. Creator sees zero dollars. So honestly, I don't care; I rather you pirate my stuff than buy second hand goods and take money away from purchasing new goods from creators.
In addition, it's not a mutually exclusive decision. A digital run is far less risky for a creator and can net enough profit to justify a physical run.
Let me give an example for a digital comic:
A typical comic by an amateur costs $300/page (average 22 pages per book) for penciling/inking/colouring. This is with digital not physical colouring. Physical colouring pushes the price up to $500/page due to material cost. This means a comic costs $6600 just to produce. Now if I do digital I might need a few more things (logos, random website art and a cover page of course), which runs $500-$1000. So that's $7600. After that I sell the digital comic. At a price of 2.99, I make roughly 35% of the revenue (if I sell on Apple iTunes) or 50% from comixology or around 90% on graphicly. Actually what hurts me most as a creator is people giving their money to Apple :(
Now if I do a physical run, I have the same sunk costs ($7600 from the example above) but then I need to print comics! Now I have to decide how many to print. The price per copy is depends on how many I print. If I print 5000 copies to sell, then I believe the price is around $1 per copy. So at a sale price of 3.99 (one dollar more than digital), and then I have to include distribution costs and so on, I might make $0.70 per copy. The margin is around 15% but I risk $5000 up front.
Then you talk about piracy. Okay. So then comes the issue of, how many people do I arrogantly believe will pay for my product? That's the crux of the issue. Most people assume that a pirated copy was a lost sale. But let me tell you the difference between a pirated copy and a person who wasn't going to pay me $2.99. The difference is... zero. In terms of revenue I mean. But in terms of potential future customers? +1 with the piracy.
So that is why I think digital distribution should always be tacked onto physical distribution; you're hitting a digital consumer base that is not 100% the same as the physical one (who like collector's editions and other stuff), and piracy means practically only positive gain in the future. There's about 5 artists (quite literally) in the world who would statistically lose revenue due to piracy. Everyone else would gain.
One thing people keep talking about with digital media is that there is no "gatekeeper," someone saying that something is good enough to be published and something is not good enough to be published. They're talking about things like, say, Goodreads picking up the slack.
Also if you're looking at an ebook there's a particular pattern of reviews you should watch out for. A normal book will have some sort of curve where most of the reviews are clustered around one rating. An amateurish ebook will generally have a reverse bell curve, with reviews clustered around the 4-5 range and the 1-2 range. The 4-5 range will be friends, family, and loyal fans dragged over from other sites, trying to do the writer a favor by bumping up the reviews. The 1-2 range will be unrelated people who bought the book and rated it honestly.
I've definitely seen those kinds of ratings!! It's very noticeable.
The lack of a "gatekeeper" does allow Sturgeon's Law to hit you in the face and present you with stuff like The Adventures of Archie Reynolds and Birdemic (although Birdemic actually got a publisher who recognized how bad it was and played up its cheesiness). Still, it does allow creative original ideas like Gone Home and Minecraft that otherwise wouldn't find a publisher to exist.
When I went to film school work like sensible people in the mid 2000 chumming up with international students Gave me unfettered access to a fair bit of banned overseas material before Filesharing because widespread
Still Vocally anti-censorship but there some pretty nasty shit out there
edited 20th Oct '13 3:39:22 PM by joeyjojo
hashtagsarestupidThe "gatekeeper" business model is problematic for a couple of reasons. From the perspective of a writer, it trades two disadvantages (no guarantee of publication and reduced share of earnings) for one advantage (advertising power). Whether this is a worthwhile trade depends on the writer and the book, but in most cases it isn't in favor of the writer. For example, Dune managed to show both sides of this issue. It got rejected by twenty-something publishers before a smaller company agreed to publish it. Then that publisher (which had been known for auto-repair manuals prior to that point) flexed its advertising muscles and did several radio and newspaper ads for the book (some of which were ridiculously cheesy).
However, paper book publishers are stuck with the model, simply because paper is a lot more limited in supply than digital memory space. They can only print so many books, so they have to limit which ones they print. And because they have to pay full production costs for each copy, they have to take that much more money anyway, just to cover the costs. (I'm not saying they don't line their pockets at times, but it's less than you think.)
The only things that keep them in business are the lack of knowledge of e-books (you don't need a tablet e-reader, any computer can do it with the right software note ) and the nostalgia factor of paper books.
Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)Those people would probably be satisfied with a subscription model where they pay a fee to "check out" a product for a particular length of time, rather than pay full price. After all, there's no difference between a game you play once and then sell back to the store at a lower price and a game you rent.
Then we give the publisher a cut of the rental fee, rather than the retailer keeping it all, and we're set.
Consider my son: he probably makes the most use of my Netflix account of anybody in my household, and he's watched a ton of shows that we could not possibly have afforded to buy him on DVD. The money we've saved by doing it this way is immense.
Frankly, I entirely agree that paying $20 for a movie or $60 for a game that you only watch or play once is a colossal waste of money, which motivates piracy as well as the used media market.
I believe that they are talking about the fact that the publisher does not benefit from the second sale. Obviously it benefits from the first.
edited 21st Oct '13 7:19:49 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"True but he is only watching all those shows because they're freely available. For a given value of free. You could with that argument save even more money by just getting him ball in a cup.
edited 21st Oct '13 7:19:55 AM by joeyjojo
hashtagsarestupidThat's not a fair dichotomy, joeyjojo. He could just sit in front of the TV and watch Cartoon Network, but we're paying for that as well, and if you consider the hours spent versus the price, it's a hell of a lot more expensive than Netflix - even if you count Internet access as part of the cost of the latter. We also have plenty of DVDs in the house. Hundreds.
I'm not going to tell him not to be interested in media because we have to pay money for it. "Just go pirate your shows, son, it's what Mommy does."
FYI, he spent most of yesterday outside, riding his bike with me or playing with his friends. I'm not raising a couch potato.
edited 21st Oct '13 9:42:49 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@ Meklar
But how would I accomplish that with digital media? DRM? I'm not going to punish first-sale readers by creating artificial scarcity. It's a digital product; I can't pretend it is a print product. It's simply not worth it financially to try to do any such thing. I might do subscriptions but as a creator-owned media producer, I have no servers, thus that is not actually an option. I can sign onto to someone who gives those kind of deals, in which case I don't know how much money I actually get.
@ Magruada
What do you mean by not get any sale at all? I'm not making any sale once it goes beyond first-hand market. If it circulates then cool. If not then that sucks. I don't see a dime either way.
If your work was leased (subscription model) rather than sold, you'd get ongoing revenue from anyone reading it, not just first sale revenue.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Figther: Not implying you we're but good to hear
The thing is with a subscription model you're effectually paying for the right to watch all the movies" rather then a movie''. When the price is being placed on the service the end product has no vaule.
edited 21st Oct '13 7:23:19 PM by joeyjojo
hashtagsarestupidAlso actually being able to buy things has proven more profitable than the subscription model in many things. People like to actually own things, even if it's just digital files.
It would be really hard to say. Like, if you were buying music, and you didn't know if you would like a band or not, you would probably buy a used CD rather than spend all the money on a new CD. If digital copies were the only things available, you would pirate rather than spend the money.
I think most of the times people who are dedicated fans of something will pay the money. So it's really hard to say how many people you would capture into your sale in the "meh" category by making them pay full price.
edited 21st Oct '13 7:28:39 PM by ohsointocats
@joeyjojo: Not at all. The value is in who watches what movies. You'd pay the content creators based on views rather than on purchases, as a revenue sharing model.
@ohsointocats: I completely disagree. I'd far rather subscribe to a service and be able to try any product I wanted than be forced to pay for things that I don't know if I'll like. Ownership is vastly overrated.
I've seen far more content through my You Tube and Netflix accounts than I'd ever pay for directly.
edited 21st Oct '13 7:35:22 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The same model applies to books or music. In fact, we already have libraries and radio stations — Internet or otherwise, plus you can find most new music on official You Tube channels anyway.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I'm suggesting a possible model, not talking about stuff that's already there. Although maybe there are subscription ebook services — I haven't looked for one.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Sales of Vinyl records have doubled in the UK in 2013
. It seems that a small, but growing, number of people want physical copies again. And apparently vinyl has better sound quality then CDs or downloads.
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