Pretty much everybody in the non-music industries saw what happened to music, and they want to avoid it. Music went from something you happily pay $10 each for semi-permanent access to 10-12 songs to a system where you pay $10/mo for nearly all music. Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance, so they're even more at risk of major loss. Recorded music revenues dropped by 40% between 2001 and 2014. It's coming back up, but those numbers are not inflation adjusted, and no one expects to get back to the heydays of the pre-streaming era.
> Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance, so they're even more at risk of major loss.
Lecture offers are secondary income streams for nonfiction authors (actually very similar to what live performances are for music).
Also, it would perfectly possible for publishing houses to find secondary income streams if they desired, but it is easier to complain about illegal copies than to find new income sources:
Just to give one possible example that could open new secondary income streams for publishing houses: why don't publishing houses sell rights for remixing or generating derived works of their published works, for example so that fanfiction becomes legal if the fanfiction author paid his fee instead of - as of today - fanfiction being in a legal grayzone?
> Just to give one possible example that could open new secondary income streams for publishing houses: why don't publishing houses sell rights for remixing or generating derived works of their published works, for example so that fanfiction becomes legal if the fanfiction author paid his fee instead of - as of today - fanfiction being in a legal grayzone?
Coz they'd prefer to control the supply and get all the profits while giving actual writers a pittance and having in their contracts that anything they write belongs to corporation that paid them. Similar deal with code really...
> Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance
Funny, I was just thinking of this.
In this current world of copyright, the secondary income stream for books seems to be selling rights to make movies & television shows for the larger audience.
Only works for bestsellers, but that's true of anything in book finances; only a small handful of bestsellers make money.
> Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance
I'd argue with some forms of writing / publishing books are the secondary income stream.
There seems to be a growing audience for online serial fiction as well as technical books that are written by the chapter, where some readers pay for early access to chapters that have yet to be released.
The outputs of these are quite long, so at some point a block of chapters gets bundled into a "book" as well as an audiobook on occasion and then sold on amazon.
Some authors then hide / remove the earlier chapters (this is not universal), or add extra bits in the book and then publish this for people who are hearing that "This story is really good, get the book to find out what happens".
Not sure what the actual economics looks like at the macro level, but it seems some authors are doing it as their full-time gig.
I spend way more on music than I used to before Spotify. Before then I might buy a few albums a year and pirate most of my collection, now I consistently give the music industry a repeatable income each month. And I hate those guys.
I’m surprised this doesn’t yet exist, to be honest.
I stopped pirating music/shows exclusively because Netflix and Spotify were more convenient. I now have mixed opinions on the ethics of piracy, but a convenient, inexpensive option for consuming books (and audiobooks) seems like a no-brainer.
O’Reilly offers this for a huge proportion of technical and business books. Amazon has a sort of offering for fiction, but it seems to offer only the back-catalogues, not current best-sellers.
Check your local library. Mine has a surprisingly robust eBook collection via Libby that's easy - and integrated with Amazon for delivery to my Kindle.
I'm actually sad to see libraries embrace DRM encumbered services that track what people are reading or use your personal information for marketing. Librarians at one time fought very hard to keep user's reading lists private, and while they lost that battle in the US and the state collects our reading lists, it seems backwards for them to hand that same data over to 3rd parties to use it for profit.
Well, Spotify and Netflix have large gaps in their catalogs, so I would expect the same to be true for a similar book service. In fact, more than half of the time I look up a book on LibGen, I come up empty.
