Amazon to Cut E-Book Prices, Shaking Rivals (making Amazon a Monopoly)

[joshcryer]

150. I love KSR, thanks for the (incidential) recommendation. :)

I like a feel good story, as it appears you're making it out to be.

I agree that there are certainly fail states where books could outlive a collapse and actually be useful after the fact (not necessarily bashing fiction or entertainment style books here, mind you, as culture can also help rebuild after a collapse, and non-science type books provided that narrative). I know you didn't state that outright but I think it's implied that basically current technology could be rendered effectively useless. I don't deny that such scenarios exist. This is one reason I dream of a Technological Rosetta Stone that is made of some very tough material (perhaps diamond coated tungsten or platinum). It'd have its own basic language in mathematics or something and could allow one to rebuild all current technology with the right resources (not necessarily relying on fossil sources at all even starting from scratch). Just a neat idea in any event.

For what it's worth I think that Amazon is going to become obsolete in due course, they just had a hegemony on book delivery and took it to its logical ends (they would've been a poor company to not do that, all these other companies saw that digital distribution was the future). I wrote a little post about how I think it will go in my journal if you're interested. Basically I think open source distribution will take over, one day. It will take awhile though. Authors previously getting 17.5% are happy to get 70%. It will be awhile until they decide that they want 100% (or 95-99%). Open (likely P2P or grid based) distribution is the only way to achieve that, outside of the government mandating it (and even then the government couldn't do it without open source I would argue).