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Adrian Hon (adrianhon@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 19-Jan-2024 13:30:07 JST Adrian Hon

“A publisher told me that his (successful) business operated on the rule of thumb that 80% of books were not read by the purchaser - they were either gifts or found their way onto glass tables or dusty bookshelves
…That's why we like to say a record collection defines who you are, and a book collection defines who you really want to be.”
Will Page in the Winter 2023 issue of The Author
In conversation about 10 months ago from mastodon.social permalink
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1. One of the key problems of making the Spotify model fit audiobooks is that music is relatively homogeneous, as most songs last the same and all songs are consumed at the same pace, whereas books are heterogeneous, varying in both length, consumption time and most notably the highly variable list price. Moreover, whereas it's normal for people to listen to music many times over, they typically only listen to a book once. That is, of course, if books are read at all - which touches on the inconvenient problem of what in economics is called breakage, when purchased items go unused. When I was researching my book, Pivot, a publisher told me that his (successful) business operated on the rule of thumb that 80% of books were not read by the purchaser - they were either gifts or found their way onto glass tables or dusty bookshelves. I challenged him to justify a business with that much breakage, to which he replied, That's why we like to say a record collection defines who you are, and a book collection defines who you really want to be.' 12 The Author Winter 2023
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