This morning I drew an analogy between the changes in publishing and the development of the interstate highway system.
Yeah. I know, but it’s what I’m thinking about.
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I had a similar experience with people around me telling me that I needed to open a computer store. I had already seen the difference between the one computer store that had lasted for 20+ years, and the dozens of computer stores that had sprung up and died within 6 months or a year…
The basic difference was having stock, vs. “we’ll order that for you”. This was acute, even before the rise of the Internet, as Computer Shopper showed up each month, and as I’m sure you remember it was a *HUGE* tome of thousands of ads! If you spent a few minutes going through Computer Shopper, figuring shipping, and then went to these short-term computer stores, they’d offer to order it for you – and their price would be more than you would pay if you ordered it yourself out of Computer Shopper straight from the source!
And more, much of the time, especially in a business environment, even over-night can be an intolerable delay. The key difference the one long-term computer store had was that it had stock in hand. Hard drive crashed? Run down to Hank’s and get a new one so we can get this restore started! Printer out of ink? Run down to Hank’s. Newly deployed program is crashing the computer because it’s short of RAM? You guessed it. LAN card, LAN cables, modems, printers, etc – he had for the most part, at least one or two good ones on hand if you had to have it *NOW*. And even if you didn’t have to have it now, he had stuff you could pull off the shelf and examine, and for a lot of the games, you could see it run on one of his computers.
People just didn’t realize that it takes quite a bit of capital to set up a computer business that’s going to last – that it’s not enough to just have a mouse or two, a couple of out of date used systems, and a table with “repaired” systems (usually, a reformat-and-reinstall Windows repair job) waiting for pickup.
Likewise with the independent bookstores – you have to have books on hand, or yeah, people will just order them from Amazon. And with e-books, you have to work harder to give that instant gratification – because I’m one of those who reads a book for content. I enjoy the feel of holding a good book in hand, love the smell of leather and paper – but seriously, having a library of several hundred books that I can literally carry with me all the time makes up for a lot of that. If I get the urge to re-read Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, because I’ve heard a movie is in development, well, it’s there. (and it is – the dev team presented the Heinlein Estate with a completed script to get permission. Seems the Heinlein Estate is a bit suspicious of movie rights people these days…)
As for working conditions at Amazon – I can’t help but remember Plauger’s “Child of All Ages”, where the girl explains why children worked at the Dickensian factories of the 1700s and 1800s, instead of working on farms…
There’s a reason you mostly see blacksmithing done at RenFaires…