Atomic Unit
Why was the Internet so destructive to the music and newspaper industry but not to books? (While bookstores have indeed got hit, books haven’t). Evan Hughes points out the difference between those industries in his article titled Books Don't Want to Be Free , a shot at the Internet mantra of “Information Wants to Be Free”: “Part of the problem for journalism, music, and television is that they are vulnerable to disaggregation. Their products are made up of songs and articles and shows that have long been consumed in those individual units. Once the Internet made it possible to ignore the unwanted material, overall value slipped.” But books are different: “It would make little sense to break novels or biographies into pieces, and they’re not dependent on the advertising that has kept journalism and television artificially inexpensive and that deceives the consumer into thinking the content is inexpensive to make.” To put it differently, the Internet showed us that t...