
If we look up for a moment from our everyday business, to look at what is already happening to books, but especially to what the music industry is already doing, how can we continue to sleep soundly?
What does what is happening to music say to us? It tells us that the model based on selling content for the payment of a price, or the model taken verbatim – mutatis mutandis – from reality as it used to be, one made of plastic CDs and pages of paper printed with ink, will work less and less, and will quickly disappear.
A year ago I bought for EUR 25 the possibility of having all the music bought on Apple on iCloud, and being able to upload (in some way legalising it) all the music that I already had. And it seemed incredible to me: I still wonder what on earth Apple must have proposed to the major labels to get them to give the go-ahead to such an (apparently) crazy plan.
I don’t have time to deal with that, so I’ll throw in Spotify: I pay €10 per month (ok, €9.90), and… I dunno, I’m not sure how to say this: I have access to all the music I want, when I want, without limits. EUR 120 per year, far more than the EUR 25 from Apple, but I don’t have to buy anything! This is the more serious and significant version of Rifkin (not his fancier and more unrealistic later environmentalist version), that insightful visionary of the late 1990s, the writer of Age of Access (of course since it’s a book from 2000 neither the original English publisher nor Mondadori with the Italian translation thought of making the digital version available) and the culture of Hypercapitalism, to a tee. What do I really want? To own files? No, to listen to music, the music I want to listen to, whenever I want, when and where I want. And Spotify satisfies that desire.
It is already happening with music. Would someone be kind enough to give me a few valid reasons why this should not be happening with books? I’d be happy to hear them, given the current classical distribution of ebooks out there, and I might sleep a little more soundly at night. But I fear that there aren’t any, and that I need to concentrate and get my head down once again to deal with all this and not get overwhelmed.