If you’re saying that *none* of these three is a game-changer at this point, I agree. My basic point all along was that there’s something wrong when Kindle, with half a million sales (maybe: Amazon still won’t say) is heralded as a game-changer, while Blu-ray, with ten million sales, is yawned at. Fact is, people are buying Blu-ray players and discs in substantial quantities, already up to something like 9% of the video disc market. Is it going to replace DVD in any near future? Only if publishers force it by stopping DVD production (as they did with VHS), and I don’t see that happening.

I also fully agree with your penultimate paragraph–and as a sometimes author, it’s my main reason for poking fun at Chris Anderson and “free everything”: It doesn’t work for most authors.

As for “niche market”–there, I’d disagree. Not that vinyl is going to make some enormous comeback (that seems unlikely), but to me, a niche market can be as small as you want, if it’s sustainable and profitable. 60,000 people is WAY more than enough, if they’re the right 60,000. But it’s really a matter of definition, and not worth arguing–and, as I say, I’m not one of those who either thinks vinyl is the holy grail of audio or who thinks it’s going to make a dramatic comeback in terms of overall market penetration.

With regard to Blu-Ray, there are few factors at work here. I think the most overlooked is just plain customer fatigue. The American video consumer has been bombarded with video formats for the last twenty-five years. VHS, Beta, C.E.D., LaserDisc, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray to name just the formats featuring pre-recorded content. So I think the American consumer is, quite justifiably, sitting back to see what happens. Blu-Ray discs are too expensive. The hardware is only now reaching the point where it will become a more common or mass market item. Add in the specter of digital download and you have a scenario where Blu-Ray is received with as much cynicism as excitement.

I don’t want to beat the LP thing to death but I want to add that I’ve heard the whole “LP Comeback” so many times I’ve tired of it and probably was a tad more strident than I intended to be. LPs were a romantic and very satisfying media in some ways even given their many inherent and I would add, fatal, flaws but with less than 1% percent of the market I’m not sure if they even merit even a “niche market” designation.

As for ebooks and the Kindle, I have my own opinions as a consumer. The main thing holding me back is pricing of the content. I won’t pay $19 for a digital download when I can buy a physical copy for about the same price. This is the thing the publishers have not come to grips with yet (the same could be said of the dying music industry). And while I love physical books, the idea that I could have my entire library in one device is quite appealing. The problem is, I won’t spend thousands of dollars to reload that library onto a Kindle just for convenience sake. I’d rather spend those thousands on new books. I wonder how many other people share those feelings?

And frankly, I wouldn’t even contemplate making the conversion for at least five years. I think then we’ll see better screens and possibly a more uniform standard of epublishing which would make devices such as the Kindle more appealing, to me at least. Amazon has made some smart first steps with the Kindle such as making their content available to customer’s across different hardware platforms (you can read your ebooks on the Kindle or an iPhone, if you want to). As terrible as the iPhone is for reading books, it is a smart move.

The big hurdle, again, from an rather uninformed consumer standpoint, is that musical artists have other avenues to make money from their content. They could, arguably, give away their music digitally and make money performing and selling merchandise. Authors, not so much. So where the revenue is going to come from to help ebook pricing come down to a level that makes the format more enticing to the average consumer is going to be interesting. I don’t know the answer.

Thanks again Walt for reposting my comment and for an interesting thread.