Follow me on a naive exercise here:
Zoom out from books only let's look at some media that are competing for people's attention in 2021.
(not exhaustive:)
- Video-games (including mobile)
- Social Media (fb, tiktok instagram etc)
- Video streaming services (youtube, netflix, etc)
- Music (single purchase and streaming)
- TV (yup still going)
- News (TV, and online mostly)
- books (print and ebooks)
Let's state that most of these industries have seen the amount of content published increase exponentially in the last 15 years.
Assuming that premise to be true is it really that much of a surprise that the average income of each content author is decreasing?
The only way that would be surprising is if the number of available attention hours was increasing at an even faster rate (which i guess would not be impossible if you could measure the masses of digital consumers who entered the "attention market" in that same time period).
My guess is that the scales tip a lot to the supply side though.
We simply have too much stuff being produced now and not enough people to consume it.
Then there is the fact that in the open publishing models we have now the market does get flooded with a lot of below par quality stuff.
The way we deal with it now is typically by some sort of popularity based algorithm that aggregates attention on a few winners and produce a huge long tail of "looser" content.
I don't know if i have the right "picture" here but it is certainly my gut feeling that there is too much stuff out there for it to retain the same value.
Is that snow in the background? Probably a temperature thing? (lack of enough testing in low temperatures?) Can be that the glass is fine but that the frame surrounding the glass is contracting too much or twisting in the "wrong" direction when cooled. Causing the glass to shatter.
I think most of the comments so far are focusing on the lack of durability of some items in the catalog, but are failing to see that overall there is in fact a lot of 2nd hand buying and selling going on with items generally in good condition.
Over the last 15years I have bought (and sold on) a lot of 2nd hand IKEA furniture. (In fact looking at my house now, I can only see 2 or 3 items that were bought new and the rest are 2nd hand and in excellent condition. There is a very very active market.
My daughter's toddler size bed was bought 2nd hand and moved on to the next parent still in remarkably good condition after she wouldn't fit in the bed anymore.
I think this is more of a classic "kill the 2nd hand marked" move.
I guess the gist of it is more that with digital assets you don't really need to wait at the right place. You keep laying "traps" in several places as you "wait". Then just keep on the lookout and when one of the "traps" is triggered go and attack it again taking in mind the current context.
When I click [Go] button in link [1] it hangs for 3 seconds and then deletes all the blocks and replaces them with just a block with the string "test" inside.
>“We’re going after the most complicated systems that have ever been built, and checked all the boxes with this digital technology. In fact, [we’ve] not just checked the boxes, [we’ve] demonstrated something that’s truly magical.”
Words above are from Will Roper - Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics
Even the Air Force is copying "Apple" speak these days....