On Apr 13, 2012, at 4:44 AM, David H. Bailey wrote:
> > wanted to make pricing uniform. That makes some sense for music
> > tracks (largely the same value, size, usefulness for each item) but
> > just doesn't work for books, whose value and complexity vary by
> > hundreds of magnitudes.
>
> Are you really saying that recording a movement of a Beethoven symphony
> that is 10 minutes by a full orchestra of 100 musicians has the same
> value and size and usefulness and original cost as a 3-minute grunge
> rock tune made by 4 musicians?
Yes, I am saying that -- although I qualified it, and said only that they were *closer* in value, size, and complexity.
(You had to go all the way to the extremes to make them look different at all.)
I was saying that a current pop tune, and a classic rock tune, a folk ballad, a jazz piece, an R&B tune --
most of the varieties of music that are popularly sold are of roughly similar sizes, lengths, and data complexities.
(No, I am not saying musical value or degree of effort by the musicians.)
Books have a much larger range of those factors.
A kids book (25 pages, lightweight images), young adult 'pulp' (200 pages, prose), a novel (400 pages, prose text only), a reference text (400 pages, dense data), a textbook (600 pages, dense data, prose, diagrams, & images mixed, updated annually), and a topic overview (prose and dense images).
Each page has a different value to the reader, and a very different repeat value, too.
But all I meant from all of that is that music is easier to justify putting into a single-price sales model than books.
The single-price model helps consumers focus on the content rather than price, even if it also implies that all levels of effort and expertise are of the same value to end-users.
