Tag Archives: money

E-books Are Pricing Themselves Out of Their Own Market

Books, Business, , , , , , , , ,

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but e-books are becoming a lot more expensive than they were a few months ago. An example is Stieg Larrson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Several months ago, it was selling for $5.00. So was its sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. Both of them are now priced at $7.99. In those last few months, nothing was added to the books that caused them to be worth more money. As a matter of fact, using the usual models of books, the prices should have gone further down, not up.

At the same time, look at some of the bestselling books also, like Decison Points by George W. Bush. It was $9.99. Now, it’s $14.99. That’s ridiculous. But looking at all books, ALL of the prices are going up.

Basically, Kindle books and e-books in general, were seen as economical and a great deal. Now, they’re not worth the price. They’re really not.

Yes, I own a Kindle, but I think I’m going to stop buying Kindle books for the near future and buy all of my books in hardcover and paperback. The e-book market is pricing itself out of existence.

I’m not sure that’s a great idea, but I guess it’s their choice to make.

The Illustrious iPad 2

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Yesterday, Apple did its big announcement of the Ipad 2. Basically, after all is said and done, it’s the original iPad with a few extra bells and whistles. Or the same bells and whistles, but they made the bells chime longer and the whistles a little louder. What was probably more interesting was the fact that Apple is so paranoid about the people that will be replacing Steve Jobs when he retires/dies that they brought Jobs out of sick leave to make his usual announcement. This does not bode well for the future of Apple if they can’t even let the man rest long enough and let his successors actually try to succeed.

Having said all of that, I thought I would then address the Ipad 2 itself. Without getting into the details of the device, like it has the whole camera thing, supposedly a better screen (that might not be immediately available) and, well, nothing else that makes me want to go out and buy one. What is significant about the Ipad itself is that nothing announced so far has me anxious to want to go out and buy one. Yeah, I’ve been in Best Buy a few times where I’ve played with one to see how cool it is, but after I’m done playing with it, I realize that it doesn’t do anything that I don’t already have covered. And unlike my iPhone, it doesn’t combine enough OTHER things that I might want to add it to my toys to replace stuff that has become too encompassing.

And that is definitely the problem of the Ipad. There’s nothing about it that causes me to think it’s worth buying an actual tablet computer. And that’s the problem that Apple is facing in the long haul. Right now, it owns the tablet market, but it is still trying to build a “need” rather than a curiosity for that market. In olden days, when every house has an oven, there was this new device called the microwave oven. And it took a lot of convincing to “convince” housewives that they needed the gadget because an oven was capable of doing everything the new device could do. However, a media campaign that could have riveled the attack at D-Day managed to convince the average American that it was now a need, not a curiosity, or something for the rich only.

That is what the tablet still has to do, and it’s not succeeding. Sure, Apple is selling a lot, but Apple sells a lot of a lot of things that don’t become household givens. Until tablet companies do something that convinces the average person, like me, that we should want and need one of these gadgets, most of us are going to be sitting on the sidelines laughing at the people who bought one but still have no major need for one.

That is the press conference that Apple needs to succeed at. So far, they haven’t done it. As a matter of fact, Apple has recently done everything possible to destroy its own little niche market by trying to own that market completely through draconian rules and charges that benefit Apple only, cutting out other companies from investing in the Apple dynasty. As long as that keeps happening, you’re going to have a lot of people thinking, well maybe I don’t need the Apple one, so they’ll look at the other companies and then suddenly realize they don’t need a tablet at all. So far, the tablet hasn’t been the success that spin doctors really want you to think it is. The majority of Americans haven’t bought into it. A lot of people have, but a lot of people doesn’t translate to market saturation or even market itemization. It’s a gimmick right now, and as long as it remains in that category, it’s going to stay a gimmick.

Now, I know there are people reading this who are thinking, “hey, I bought one and I love it.” That’s fine, but you’re the outliers right now who Apple and tablet companies want to use to convince everyone else that their product is relevant. So, you need to start doing that and earning your pay you’re not receiving from a company that wants to get as much money out of you as possible by limiting your options in getting the best bang from your product. So do their dirty work for them. That’s kind of how the game works. For them. Be the tool they need you to be.

‘Tis the Season to be Concerned About Money

Economics, Religion, , , , , , , ,

One thing I can always count on during this wonderful holiday season is that someone somewhere is going to try to guilt me into spending money. If it’s not on a television commercial that is concerned that my loved ones might be very unhappy with whatever choice of present I decide to give them, it’s the actual show itself where the main character will somehow be forced into a Quixotic quest to find the right present so that Christmas doesn’t turn out as horrible as every previous one that character has experienced.

But if I turn off my TV, I’m immediately bombarded by Christmas cheer on the radio. The other day, I went through my preselected channels, finding nothing but Christmas carols and admonishments about what I was buying people for Christmas. Upset at that, I turned off the radio, opened a magazine, and sure enough because it was the September issue of Girls Who Like to Do It, (or whatever magazine it was I was reading), every ad in the stupid magazine had some stupid Christmas theme that told me I was supposed to be spending money. So I walked down the street, and everywhere I went that had a cash register, including some corner parking lot that was selling trees, the topic was everything about selling me crap that I didn’t want.

I’ll let you in on a secret. I don’t really have much of a family. My parents are both deceased, my sister lives in California with her own family, and I’ve never married. My stuffed animals and I have an agreement that we don’t have to buy each other presents, so I don’t really have much in my life that concerns me when it comes to Christmas.

Except that everyone and his brother thinks I should be out shopping for people to buy people presents.

I know this is a common gripe, but Christmas has completely stopped being about the spirit of Christmas. Forget the whole stupid War on Christmas crap. We’re in full mode Buy Everything Under the Sun Because It’s Christmas mode, and it’s really annoying. You see, I actually like to shop for things for myself every now and then, but I can’t seem to do that during Christmas (which starts sometime in July and ends sometime in February) because every clerk in every store wants to regale me about all things Christmas. Some of us don’t celebrate Christmas because we’re alone.

Did you know that suicides happen most often during the Christmas season? Might that have something to do with the fact that a lot of us don’t actually have a lot going on during this seasons YET EVERYONE KEEPS REMINDING US OF IT? There are some days that if I could find a bridge high enough, I’d jump from it, if it would just get people to stop trying to instill Christmas cheer into me when I don’t have anything to be cheerful about.

CNN is no different. Just today, I was reading through articles, and sure enough there’s a self-help article on what to do when you run into a tight budget during Christmas.  How about NOT buying any gifts? That’s a solution, too. If I don’t buy any gifts, I incur absolutely NO financial hardship. Yet, for some reason that’s not an option in our consumer driven mad mania of all things Christmas.

While we’re all worried about how to afford it all, we sort of forget that there are a whole bunch of people who are struggling just to put normal food on the table, regardless of the spirit of the season. Today, in Bay City, hundreds of people turned out for a food giveaway. Dozens were turned away, because they ran out of food. Meanwhile, stores are telling us to spend as much as we can on the family because we need to jumpstart the economy. Well, I’ll let you in on a secret. The real problem is not the economy; it’s the people who aren’t surviving the economy. They kind of get forgotten so we can worry about whether or not banks can recover from losing mortgage payments. If we were really thinking about our fellow citizens, Obama and Bush would have been arguing for a stimulus package that put food on the tables of starving people rather than whether or not we bailed out banks that make very rich people even richer.

If there’s a spirit of Christmas, watching for its message on a television show isn’t where you’re going to find it. I find it interesting that we keep trying to reinvent the message of Christmas with new million dollar budgeted movies when Charlie Brown really got it from Linus every year during the most succinct, fulfilling monologue ever delivered:

Linus says, “I’ll tell you the meaning of Christmas, Charlie Brown.” And Linus, who has worried over memorizing his part in the pageant, goes to center stage, asks for the stage lights, and begins to say, in that wonderful little boy’s voice, “And there were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night, and lo the angel of the lord came upon them and the glory of the lord shone round about him, and they were sore afraid, and the angel said unto them, fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord. And suddenly there was with the angels a multitude of the heavenly hosts, praising God and saying, Glory to God in highest heaven and peace on earth god will to men.”

The funny thing is: I’m not even very religious, and that monologue gets me every time. For there are many people who often misconstrue the monologue to be strictly religious, and it doesn’t really have to be. What it delivers to Charlie Brown, from Linus, is that on that day hope was delivered where none had been before. For some, it was a religious moment; for others, it was a moment of believing that perhaps there is more to oneself than just thinking about oneself. And little Charlie Brown goes off and realizes that his little tree can be much more than just the little thing he has before him, and it becomes that much more powerful as a result of his hope and, if you wish to believe so, his faith.

Not once was it about money, greed or the perfect present.

The Epic Battle for Your Money

Economics, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , ,

There’s an epic battle being fought these days in which the goal is nothing less than your hard earned money. Sadly enough, the only ones not benefiting from the struggle are us, the actual consumers. We’re mainly the victims, the targets and the ones who manage to keep making it so that we keep getting screwed over, cheated and abused. If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be funny.

I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but at one point we went from being consumers who were part of the system to consumers of content who are outside of the system. In the old days, maybe as recent as the 1970s, we were seen as consumers in a big triangular product cycle that started with us working for companies that produced content that was sold by businesses back to the people who were responsible for making the products. It was a closed system where people in other businesses provided products while we sold the products from our revenue stream back to them. Everyone came out ahead because we all made enough to survive, and we all got the products that everyone was making for everyone else.

But something happened that caused a real problem to the system. You see, at one point, those companies that make the products realized they could make these products without the actual consumer production staff being a part of the manufacturing cycle. In other words, they could automate the production without having to pay a production staff and still manage to create enough products to sell to those other cells of the manufacturing cycle. Except, those other cells were also figuring out how to cut out the production people so that they could automate their production and maximize their profits. After a certain amount of time, we cut out one prong of the triangle, leaving basically the profitable company management and the salespeople. However, we’ve kind of cut out the people who used to be the producers of content, figuring we can do it without them.

Unfortunately, those people were also the main consumers of the content. Without them, we end up producing a lot of product for people who can no longer afford to purchase it. This was fine as long as we were only cutting out a certain segment of the production audience, but now that everyone has figured this is the way to profitability, well, we’ve made it so that there may be too few consumers to actually participate in the broken triangle.

This was a problem that has been seen for quite some time, but big companies refused to pay attention because they were making money without very much effort, and they saw no end to it. Let’s examine that for a moment. And we’ll do it by examining the old model and then see where the new model sort of makes everything no longer make sense.

The old model of capitalism was that as long as we continued to produce products, we could always sell them for a profit. This always existed with the necessity that the consumer market was always going to be able to actual purchase the items needed. Well, what has happened is that a lot of the money that is to be made in this area has now been transferred to huge corporations that reward very few people for their efforts. Outsourcing and downsizing was inevitable as companies started to exist for the sole purpose of providing better results on stock market exchanges rather than to a people-driven profit margin. But eventually, outsourcing was going to hit a point where the native population of people within these companies was going to start suffering, with more and more jobs being lost, even though prices for products would continue to go down as the labor became cheaper through the outsourcing process.

What this meant was that one of two things would happen, and the result was really based on what ideology you believed. If capitalism was truly the victor, then the outsourcing would eventually hit a point where there is no more possible outsourcing location, so that eventually the corporations would have to start feeding back on themselves, and that would lead to consolidation to the point of where expansion would have to stop and the products being produced would fall back to a Maslowian base level of survival products rather than those that feed self-actualization. There would be no profit in leisure products, like iPads, because no one would be able to buy them any more. Instead, the main production would fall back to basic necessities as the people who still had jobs would be focusing on survival rather than leisure-like activities. The numbers of elites benefiting from the system would have shrunk so small that the luxury good market would dry up overnight. Where it would go from here is unknown as we’ve never reached this expansion end point before, so anyone can guess as to what would happen next.

The other choice is the old one of eventual communism, which is almost a direct insult to anyone who believes in corporatism and capitalism. Communism needs capitalism, however. Because once we’ve reached what’s called a saturation point (where companies have pretty much grown as big as they can become and profit is no longer profitable), then the system turns inwards, and the mass population that has been forced into corporate slavery then turns on the economic system and takes over its cogs and wheels. Their success would be in direct violation of the system, so this would probably bring on an economic revolution where the state would eventually turn into a police state where the military and police would act in the interests of business, turning on individual workers. The workers would probably suffer a number of defeats, with many deaths and even worse working conditions, until eventually they succeeded and overthrew the corporate entities that maintain control over the dynamic.

That’s if you believe either one of these theories of economics. However, what should be pointed out is that we have hit a point where people with economic clout are trying harder than ever to sell us crap we don’t need, and the crap that we do need is being put into flux, so that we are actually having to fight for these things. An example of the former is the various industries of utilities and intellectual property. Heat and electricity is pretty low on the Maslowian scale, meaning that we generally need electricity and heat. Often, the industries that hold power in these areas see themselves as a necessity and do everything possible to act like they are working in our best interest. Gas companies make really cute commercials about how the cars are all fuzzy and happy, and that they’re our friends. Meanwhile, the executives of these companies make insane profits and even when they destroy our natural resources with bad decisions on their part (like BP and Exxon), they do as little as possible to maintain their hegemonies and then try to make the problems go away by paying off only as many people as they need to do. The clean-ups in Alaska and on the East Coast have been afterthoughts, and already there have been attempts to do the least possible, while lawyering up rather than be the conscientious industries we’d like them to be. In the end, they’ll still manage to pull off outrageous profits, and the ones who were hurt the most will always be hurt the most.

The latter of those two choices (utilities and intellectual property) is even more fascinating in that the consumer isn’t even being considered a part of the discussion, even though the consumer is the one who funds pretty much everything. Organizations like the Recording Industry Assocation of America (RIAA) have been so outdated for so long now, holding onto old technology like record companies, that rather than modernize themselves as they should have done so long ago, they sue anyone they can think of, realizing that if they cast their net wide enough, they’ll manage to bring in enough profit to keep themselves going in perpetuity. The fact that they haven’t been relevant in years is rarely discussed by them; they’re more interested in maintaining a status quo that has been gone for many years now. Let’s face it. People are now getting a lot of their intellectual content (music, movies, TV, and games) for free because the Internet has made that possible. A lot of the potential customers they have lost are young people who have grown up getting this stuff for free for most of their lives. The RIAA and other such organizations should have been catering to these kids a long time ago, not slapping them with lawsuits the second they realized there was a problem already out of control. And even worse, the customer base they already had (older people like me), they abandoned by focusing on that young crowd, trying to sell the ideological equivalent of freezers to Eskimos. Had they continued to support the older class of customers, who were used to buying content from stores, they might have maintained years of profitability while slowly switching over to a model that could have catered to this younger crowd. Instead, whenever I walked into a record store, or an establishment that sold CDs, I see tons of titles that are geared towards young kids who aren’t going to buy any of the stuff because they can get it for free. There’s none of it that caters to me, and I’m sorry, but an occasional compilation CD of music I already own is NOT what anyone my age considers “catering” to me. It’s not even trying.

So, this brings me to what’s going on today. There are all sorts of people who see the rest of us as nothing but blind consumers they can take advantage of because they don’t care anything about us because they either outsourced us, or they see us only as mindless automatons who are only around to buy their junk. Google announced today that they are now going to be giving us the ability to buy books online. Basically, even though Amazon and Barnes & Noble have already done, Google indicates that it’s going to allow people to buy books in e-reader format, but then turns around and pretty much tells publishers that they’re only offering 52 percent of the profit of the books sold. Amazon and B&N have been offering closer to 70 percent profit. Apparently, Google seems to think that it deserves more of the money for a product that they did not create and basically only offer as a reading service. It’s like a tape recorder company demanding half of the profit of all music produced because it provided the tape recorder used to make the music. The only reason Google can offer this is because Google has power right now, and it will be interesting to see how the publishers respond to this insult of an offer, especially when they already have two viable processes for releasing e-reader content. Google is proving itself to be a great successor to Microsoft in all ways Dr. Evil-like.

Another story that has been making a play is also very important to this issue, and it involves reality TV stars the Kardashians, who are basically a trio of tarts who have no actual talent other than being famous for being famous. When their launch onto the public scene was through a sex tape that was sold by one of them, we really shouldn’t be expecting a whole lot more. Yet, they decided to play the profit game by tapping into their fan base and offering a misleading credit card that essentially cheats the living crap out of anyone stupid to ever use one. They’ve suddenly decided to distance themselves from the card AFTER a public outcry came out following the revelation that the card was generally little more than a massive scam, in that it does so many things that a paid for credit card should never do. In reality, the Kardashians backed away from their card because they were found out and it was going to become a headache to have to explain how they were profiting by cheating the crap out of people who were stupid enough to believe in them.

But their case is an example of what is going on today. Companies, celebrities and even governmental officials have no problem cheating the crap out of potential consumers mainly because they don’t see these consumers as a part of the original triangle I was talking about. So many people have been taken out of the equation that we’re no longer considered associates, friends or partners, but potential victims to take advantage of.

So what can we do about it? Stop buying the crap that people are selling you whenever you discover they’re part of this bad group of profiteers. Right now, we have a little bit of say in the future of where this goes, but as long as we continue to act like sheep and get taken advantage of, things will only continue to get worse, and eventually we’ll have little to no say in the matter.