Board 8 > The problem with book (and other media) sales moving to online

(+) Yeah! (+)

People talk about how much more selection you have online, and yeah sure it's great that I'm able to buy some B-movie from the 70's off of Amazon, but what about those "not in the know." People don't browse Amazon the same way they browse in a brick and mortar store. People who are shopping online know what they are going for and they expect to get it instantly. They're not likely to go through the racks and stumble upon something they hadn't heard of before, but which looks pretty interesting, and which they end up enjoying. I would gladly give up my ability to buy some obscure Erich Romer film if it meant that more people in their local video would come across Chinatown by accident.


I remember going to Blockbuster when I was younger and not always coming out with the movie or game that I came in for. That wasn't a bad thing! I was exposed to a lot of good movies/video games that way, but that opportunity is gone the more and more people move towards online sales and digital distribution. People just expect instant gratification, which is not healthy mentally/socially, and also doesn't lead to good cultural exposure. Most film/book/music buffs in the 90's probably had access to the resources to get themselves 90%+ of the various products they wanted, whether through catalogs/stores/libraries/etc, so in exchange for getting access to that extra 10%, and to make life more convenient, we've given up the ability to expose great culture to others. There's a lot of products for sale on Amazon, but most people aren't going to take advantage of that opportunity. They're just going to go after what's most popular.

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"Ahem! There is *sand* on my *boot*!"--Kefka
Black Turtle beat me, Yesmar in the Fall 2010 Guru Contest!

this didn't happen to music


like at all

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Then you can do a google search for, say, "good 80's horror movies" or "70's blaxploitation" and get a wide selection of titles, with much more information than you'd get just by checking out the box covers and synopsis on the back.

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Couldn't the argument go the other way? Since there is expanded selection, and it's easier to obtain, aren't people MORE likely to try obscure releases?

Imagine someone hearing about a interesting movie on Wikipedia, or talking to a friend online. Instead of thinking, "I might want to check that out" and then completely forgetting about it the next time they visited a store (even if the store managed to have it), they can now immediately look it up and buy it quicker than ever. I don't think convenience would limit people's choices, quite the opposite.

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I remember going to Blockbuster when I was younger and not always coming out with the movie or game that I came in for.

I remember walking out of Blockbuster with scratched copies of DVDs and games and wanting online media as soon as possible to not have to deal with that sort of nonsense anymore.

Yay for online media!

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Geologists will date anything.

my only problem with online distribution is how DRM laden it tends to be and that you never really own something, you just get a license to use it and you can get screwed out of things you've paid for very easily.

Then you can do a google search for, say, "good 80's horror movies" or "70's blaxploitation" and get a wide selection of titles, with much more information than you'd get just by checking out the box covers and synopsis on the back.

That doesn't have anything to do with directly buying the movies though. And not limiting oneself to a particular genre gives people more opportunity anyway.

Couldn't the argument go the other way? Since there is expanded selection, and it's easier to obtain, aren't people MORE likely to try obscure releases?

Imagine someone hearing about a interesting movie on Wikipedia, or talking to a friend online. Instead of thinking, "I might want to check that out" and then completely forgetting about it the next time they visited a store (even if the store managed to have it), they can now immediately look it up and buy it quicker than ever. I don't think convenience would limit people's choices, quite the opposite.

But the chances of that happening for an obscure movie aren't really out of proportion as they would be with a mainstream movie. If someone really wanted to see the movie, I'm sure they could have gotten it somehow pre-Internet. The chances of someone not being able to find a movie they wanted pre-Internet, post-home video, don't seem particularly high to me.Sure there's a chance that someone would have gone to the video store and not been able to get the obscure movie they wanted, but I feel that that's greatly outweighed by the lowered curiosity that people have when they choose movies themselves.

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"Ahem! There is *sand* on my *boot*!"--Kefka
Black Turtle beat me, Yesmar in the Fall 2010 Guru Contest!

I remember walking out of Blockbuster with scratched copies of DVDs and games and wanting online media as soon as possible to not have to deal with that sort of nonsense anymore.

Yay for online media!

Blame the media then. I never had a consistent problem with VHS tapes. And the same basic thing would happen in bookstores/libraries/video stores as well that didn't deal with reusing such flimsy materials.

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"Ahem! There is *sand* on my *boot*!"--Kefka
Black Turtle beat me, Yesmar in the Fall 2010 Guru Contest!

From: Grand Kirby | #004
Since there is expanded selection, and it's easier to obtain, aren't people MORE likely to try obscure releases?

This happened with music, and is happening with ebooks. Genre sales for unestablished authors take up a significant portion of all ebook sales.


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ICON:
#Kanyeshrug

[This message was deleted at the request of the original poster]

This happened with music, and is happening with ebooks. Genre sales for unestablished authors take up a significant portion of all ebook sales.

But how many of those genre sales are from people who are now limiting themselves from any other genres?

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"Ahem! There is *sand* on my *boot*!"--Kefka
Black Turtle beat me, Yesmar in the Fall 2010 Guru Contest!

Most video stores don't have that great of a selection at all. They're just not enough storage space.

And finding good media is easy online. Just go to a forum, ask people for recommendations. Almost all of my favourite metal bands have come about that way.. I never would have had exposure like that before. And if literally no one is recommending a band then there's a very low chance that they're any good. It's much easier to weed out all the garbage. Also, most music stores do not even carry most of the bands I like, besides stuff like DT or Opeth.. and if they do it's twice as much as on Amazon. I'm not gonna spend thousands just trying out CDs or movies.. I wanna watch clips online to see if it's my cup of tea before making the plunge.

And I'm one of the rare people around here who actually does pay for media these days.

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http://www.last.fm/user/VinnyMendoza
"This is all we have... when we die.."

From: LOLContests | #012
But how many of those genre sales are from people who are now limiting themselves from any other genres?

it's probably around the same amount of people that didn't leave their comfort zone while shopping in store


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ICON:
I'm pretty serious about chocobos.

The loss of jobs.

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See You In Another Life, Brother.

Aren't you a little young to be acting like a jaded old guy?

If we go by JRPG standards I'm practically middle-aged!

And if people still want to get hard copies of media, they still can. I've never bothered with e-books because I find them annoying, I don't think paper books are going to go out of style anytime soon.

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Geologists will date anything.

From: Cloud and Squall | #015
The loss of jobs.

And the creation of jobs elsewhere!

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My Japanese alter-ego.
Hey all this is Bartz btw.

From: LOLContests | #001
They're not likely to go through the racks and stumble upon something they hadn't heard of before, but which looks pretty interesting, and which they end up enjoying.

This is absolutely backwards

The internet does AMAZING things for random discovery, look at things like Netflix and Pandora and Google for that matter. You don't even need to be looking for a movie or song to find something new.

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_foolmo_
'so I can potentially win the guru without getting the final right?' - BlAcK TuRtLe

Like I'm REALLY ****ing oblivious when it comes to music, I don't follow or care about anything, and if it weren't for pandora I would probably only be listening to the same 2 songs over and over.

But thanks to the internet and digital music, I can just listen to pandora for a day or two and I will almost always find a new band that I love.

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_foolmo_
'so I can potentially win the guru without getting the final right?' - BlAcK TuRtLe

The internet does AMAZING things for random discovery, look at things like Netflix and Pandora and Google for that matter. You don't even need to be looking for a movie or song to find something new.

The Internet is not online shopping, which is what I'm talking about. Of course there's good aspects to the Internet when it comes to exposing people to media. That doesn't mean that Amazon's doing that. How many people even use Pandora? Compared to the amount of people that shop online instead of in brick and mortar stores.

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"Ahem! There is *sand* on my *boot*!"--Kefka
Black Turtle beat me, Yesmar in the Fall 2010 Guru Contest!

I think the point is that the expansion of people to new media from the internet kind of negates any loss from online shopping.

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I'm "kind of a big deal".
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Seems to me that Amazon has plenty of options for browsing and finding other media that you may not know about. What's even better, is you can read hundreds of user reviews about the item, get product descriptions, images, competitive pricing, and more! But that's not as good as wandering aimlessly in a store, is it?

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My Japanese alter-ego.
Hey all this is Bartz btw.

I can vouche that I've found way, way more bands through itunes than I ever did before.

when browsing, I can hear clips of new bands and make a much lower risk single song purchase to try them out.

back in the cd and casette days, I'd have to base purchases on the cover, and usually I would just stick to bands I knew rather than throw down $12-15 on a chance purchase.

now, since ebooks tend to have a few chapters available to sample, I can do the same with books still.

I'm pretty sure YouTube and social media have this covered. And they really do it better since they combine with the wider selection of online shopping. If you hear great word-of-mouth for something, you can look it up and easily buy it, instead of having to rely on stumbling across things at random and then also recognizing them as being worth looking into.

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Black Turtle spilled my diet soda!

Sure, the internet is not online shopping, but it is geared a lot towards finding information which can directly lead to wanting to search for ways to find new and interesting media you learn about.

Many times I will have a vague idea of what I want, refine it through research, and then go to amazon and compare prices and reviews to get a feel for the worth of a thing. This isn't something I can very easy do at a store where I have to rely on the back of the box/cover to tell me why the thing in question is awesome (and it will always say it is). By utilizing the internet, I can conclude 'this show/item/book/band is ok, but THESE are much better'; the THESE being ones found via recommendations or youtube clips or whathaveyou. The internet just offers more ways to search and find rarer material that doesn't rely on you maybe stumbling upon something in some dusty corner of some place.

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There is no shame in not knowing; the shame lies in not finding out

UltimaterializerX posted...
Cloud and Squall posted...
The loss of jobs.

Comes entirely from people not knowing the difference between rich, mega-rich and the middle class. The true way to stimulate job growth is making sure small business owners and the upper middle class has their money, because the people at the very top are never affected by political finance debates. It is the biggest fallacy perpetrated by the GOP.

When Warren Buffet goes out and says tax the rich, he knows full well he can be exempt from everything. It's how corporations can avoid paying taxes on billions in profits. He's actually looking to increase taxes on upper middle class people, which -- wait for it! -- is the true issue that costs jobs.

I've never seen you talk more out of your ass than in this post before.

Even if your points are all true, Buffet is donating like 99% of his worth to charity when he dies. He lives very modestly. What does he have to gain besides helping charity even more? How can you attack the man?

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http://www.last.fm/user/VinnyMendoza
"This is all we have... when we die.."