Books, DVDs and eBooks

Declining Sales and Pricing

And no, I'm not talking about books for a change. Seems that analyst predict a historic decline in sales for DVDs. Sales are down by about half to 10 million copies a year. And perhaps more startling is the fact that the unit price is down 15%.

I say startling, because I come out of the book world where publishers meet a decline in unit sales with an increase in price. . .

No one knows exactly why DVD sales are down -- digital downloads, pay per view and the economy certainly play a part. I suspect, however, that the real reason is because most of the movies produced in the last three years have been crap!

And Speaking of DVDs

There is a new kid on the block -- Paperspine which is the brain child of ex-Microsoftie Dustan Hubbard. He has created a Netflix for book. The service has 150,000 paperback (no hardbacks yet) titles available for checkout.

Subscribers can check out up to five books at a time. Like Netflix there are no late fees, and members return books in a prepaid envelope. They also can browse by category. There are the four subscription plans that cost between $9.95 and $24.95 a month.

Huh?

Wait a minute! Last time I checked there was this thing called a library where you can check out a book, return it when you were finished, and get another—all for free.

The Best Entertainment of the Week

This is one of the things that is basically to good to pass up; a word game that is the ultimate time waster. The great thing is that you can rationalize this one by saying that you/re contributing to a good cause.

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