Is FreeBSD simple enough for Novices, Will FreeBSD accept Office 98 + Publisher?

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

"Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm at toybox.placo.com> writes:
> The publishers got the scent of blood with the Harry Potter books, in
> some ways those books ruined the book publishing industry.  Before, nobody
> thought a mere book could garner that kind of money.  Today, they all think
> this and so are all looking for the next Harry Potter series.  As a result
> the publishing companies are buying manuscripts that they think are going to
> be big sellers based on what their marketing people think is selling, and
> not caring if the work is crap or not.  Good work that would likely have a
> niche market is being turned down, crappy work that they think is widely
> appealing is being published.

This has nothing to do with Harry Potter, it started long before that.

> I suspect that eventually when another decade has gone by and we don't
> see another Harry Potter series rearing it's head out of the unknown
> muck, the publishing houses will get back to the work of just looking
> for good works for large and small markets, developing up and coming
> authors, and all the stuff they used to do B.H.P.

I doubt it.  You know why?  Because the publishers are at the mercy of
retailers, and retailers - especially supermarkets and large chains -
aren't in the business of selling books, they are in the business of
selling *a* book.  You know which book I mean: the one that's piled
waist high on a pallet right inside the door.

Everything else in the store is a loss.  A book doesn't have to stay
on the shelf very long for the hypothetical profit to be eaten up by
the cost of storing it and of tying up your cash in inventory.  They
might as well glue the books to the shelves, and save the cost of
processing a hypothetical sale and restocking.

The pallet is *it*.

Customers don't seem to mind - when you're looking for something to
read on the train or give away as a present or you just want to be
able to follow the conversation around the water cooler at work, you
rarely go further than the pallet.  The odds are, that's the book your
colleagues are discussing anyway.

This is the same phenomenon that, in the game industry, killed the
combat flight simulator and almost killed the adventure game.  It's
not that people don't buy them, it's that retailers don't want to sell
them because they don't sell in large volumes immediately upon their
release.

It's slightly better for technical books, because they're not
interchangeable to the same degree that novels are.

Things might change if consumers shift massively from buying books in
stores to buying them online.  They haven't yet, and I don't know when
(or whether) they will.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no