An (as usual) interesting article from Tim Bray on making money in the mobile market. Then I tripped over John Gruber’s note that highlights the odd juxtaposition that software is considered expensive at $10, but somehow an eBook at $8 is not.
This spun off a couple of ideas. First and foremost, are these two things really different in any appreciable manner today? I’m starting to think that ultimately, in many cases, they are the same thing, especially for apps with relatively little server-side dependencies.
I would argue that today both require a computer to create, both require a considerable investment in sunk time before they are ready for the market and they both require mastery of a language. The fact that the languages are different in form and function is largely irrelevant. Without a mastery of the English | French | German | … language, writing a book that will sell is pretty much impossible.
Which brings me to the second thought. Putting these reflections up against the recent articles about Amanda Hocking who, like an Indie developer, created something and was able to publish it directly through electronic storefronts without going through a publisher just highlights the similarities.
Part of her success is due to the fact that she prices her books well below the prices set by books backed by traditional publishers. Her books are priced at $1-3 which means that they fall into the impulse buy range for an awful lot of people. Also at that price the fairness calculation comes into play. As a consumer I know intuitively that moving a Mb of data around should cost less than chopping down trees, turning them into pulp, transforming the pulp into paper, running this to a printing plant where someone has prepared the typesetting plates so that we can put ink onto the pages, run through a machine to chop up the paper and apply glue to the binding, put the books into boxes, and ship them hither and thither until it ends up on my doorstep from Amazon or my (rapidly disappearing) neighborhood bookstore.
The flip side of the volume pricing approach is that more people are more likely to buy, and less incentive to pirate.
As a side note on the pirating front, when I buy a brand new hardcover book you have to count that there are at least 3 “lost” sales built into that purchase per the hard line copyright advocates arguments since it will get passed around in my immediate family.
But if the price was $3, and easily available to them, I’d just recommend that others buy it directly.
Scale and scope
Can anyone be a million dollar author or developer? Obviously not, as there are so many factors in play, from genetically imbued ability combined with experience and learning, to the roll of the dice in the fickle, ever changing marketplace.
But I think that all of the sudden there’s the possibility that an awful lot more people are going to be able live directly off of the long tail in a decent fashion as there are now opportunities to publish directly, whether in the form of prose or compiled code. At the same time, it also means that there are many current jobs and professions that are becoming less and less relevant. The traditional role of the middleman as a distributor to multiple points of sale is pretty much pointless when the product can be encapsulated in a collection of bits.
There will still be a role to play in marketing and promotion as with the current glut of material available, obscurity is possibly the number one hurdle to overcome.
One good example on the obscurity front is that every time I sit down with friends and colleagues with iPads, there’s a quick review of anything new and interesting that we’ve found and it’s just amazing how many things we each find through our own sources that don’t show up on the radar of the other.