[weimerica]

How did it destroy revenue streams exactly? I’ve just never understood that to be the case.

(Disclosure, I worked with and attended university on the dime of the folks who built Amazon’s POD acquisition - so I have some fealty (and insight), I suppose)

[ggm]

I've used POD, and within limits, its amazing (the fussyness about KDP print-ready markup is a royal pain, but I blame the PDF standards bodies for that, not to mention the iSBN scam business worldwide. anyhoo)

Imagine you have 100 troubadours, touring the kings domains worldwide, for a free food in return for a song, of which only Blondel makes a mint. Then imagine you allow anyone who can play the penny whistle to join: you now have 10,000 touring musicians, all chasing the same meal, but only 10 of them can play as well as Blondel: in aggregate there;s more music but less of it is earning the price of dinner.

Kindle has 1,000,000 authors. 999,000 of them write $2 romances or how-to books which earn them side-gig money. 1000 of them will ever be good enough to enter the booker prize. Authors overall are earning on average, less because instead of being essentially broke hobos who live off the advance, they're living off the profits on $2 sells but have to work bloody hard to be "seen" in amongst the success stories. Philip Pullman and Dan Brown aside, on average Authors are not entirely happy with Kindle. Yes, there's more money out there but the jam is being spread thinner.

(I was told this by a retiring authors agent here in Australia btw. She was adamant her "list" did worse overall. Other people might say thats not true, and it may be about dis-intermediation. She said the kindle rights were abysmal compared to traditional publishing)

[weimerica]

I suppose destroying revenue streams is a way of phrasing the “issue,” but at the end of the day we’re just further democratizing content.

If consumers don’t want $REAL_AUTHOR and so she loses money, that’s her failing to adapt to the market. I don't feel that gatekeepers creating artificial scarcity is a good thing.

[ggm]

Absent literacy programs and market growth in non English speaking economies, we're fully literate and read as much as we want. So making 100x supply side choice isn't actually "good" except to reduce income per author because in the end I only have 24h per day to read in. I can't read more. There's a disequilibrium here. Sure, choice. But the net effect is Amazon got richer and most authors and publishers lost out.