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So Many Books
Gabriel Zeid
Altho many commentators predicted that TV and Internet would kill books, in fact the opposite is happening. The number of books is increasing exponentially. In fact if present trends continue, very soon there will be more people writing books than reading them.
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If the average book is 2cm thick, you'd need 15 miles of shelves just to house the annual production.
Every day we become exponentially more ignorant. If you manage to read 1 book a day that means you've neglected the other 3999 that were published that day.
A book will make money if you can find about 3000 people who will pay about 3 hrs of the min wage. This is impt because the threshold for success is so low - unlike a Hollywood where 99/100 films simply don't get made. Now, with POD, a book can sell one copy and everyone (except author) is happy.
Socrates was opposed to writing because it would stop people using their memory, and bc he thought ideas shd circulate in conversations, so that they cd grow and cross fertilise, rather than calcify in books.
We have a choice between having time and having things, and usually we choose things.
Many magazines have such limited potential readership that not worth trouble of trying for subscriptions, but high-ticket advertisers prepared to pay to reach such focused markets.
Similarly, in many sports stadiums, the difference between making and losing money is how the concourses are designed - ie its business is actually packaging and delivering a bunch of consumers to the vendors. So a sporting event should be seen as simply a way of assembling that packaged audience to be sold to the vendors.
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1989 the British Library, which gets a "free" copy of every book published in UK, estimated that it cost £50 per book to receive, catalog and shelve each book, plus another £1 a year to maintain.
For many people, the most expensive part of reading a book is simply the time it takes. So many busy people have simply eliminated reading altogether. From this it becomes a social necessity that writers shd put a lot of effort into making their books easy to read quickly.
The amount of poetry submitted to the very few poetry magazines published illustrates the perils of increasing education levels - not so much a huge increase in readers as a huge incr in people who want to be read.
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But unfortunately, not even poetry writers want to read other's poems.
So most journals force would-be poets to subscribe - submissions are not even read unless they come from a subscriber.
If everybody who wanted to be read wd read themselves, there'd be a boom in sales, but instead the narcissism of "read me, I don't have time to read you."
The logical conclusion of this supply exceeding demand (81% of Americans had a book they thought they should write; 6 million of them have actually written a manuscript)is that prices will eventually drop below zero, and writers will have to pay people to read their books.
Now writers are allowing free downloads of books as promos for hard copies or ebooks. Similar to the experience of music distributors. At first they resisted letting radio stations playing songs for little or no royalty, but then realized that they were impt promos, to the extent that they started bribing DJ's to play selected tunes.
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