Today’s Krugman opinion piece in the N.Y. Times finds the distinguished economist pondering the implications of the Kindle, Amazon’s book reader. Krugman suggests that the arrival of the Kindle means that book authors will need to follow the path blazed by the Grateful Dead: give away your core intellectual property (your music, your mind) and make money on T-shirts and other ancillary licensing. What a fabulous idea! Next will come lawyers doing their lawyering for free and making it up with a car wash and shoeshine. Doctors will of course follow, seeing the brilliance of the logic. Surgery: FREE!!! Post-op lollipops, $25,000. Makes sense to me.
Krugman has fallen into a value trap that says because reproduction costs are going down, the underlying intellectual property value also goes down. Part of that thinking leads to the idea that music or books all have the same value. Actually, the value of everything is determined not by what it costs to make or reproduce. Real value comes from how much someone (the prospective consumer) wants something.
I’ll bet that there have already been a few times in your life when a book came along that changed your way of thinking, or even changed your life. What is that book worth to you? Two dollars? Or more likely, many thousands. What’s a book worth that changes the way you raise your child? What’s a book worth that guides you in starting or turning around your company? The right book at the right time for the right person can be close to priceless. Why then would we price books as if they are interchangeable commodities, as if all book are the same because they are called by the same name: books?
Whoever you are, and whatever you do, fight to the death to keep yourself or your work from being commoditized. It might make the economists happy to treat everything that is inherently unique and the result of special skills as if they were interchangeable, since it makes their models work better, but the reality is, most of what we value most highly is likely to be profoundly unique. Think about the members of our family, or our own greatest gifts, our favorite places, our most cherished art. For everything that counts, the value cannot be set by a commodity marketplace. Value comes from the buyer’s perception. We should price accordingly, or we’re giving it away.
My mother was a live book reviewer in Cleveland, an activity that seems to have gone the way of the traveling magic lantern lecture tent show. Fortunately for Mom, the traffic lights in our community were exceedingly slow, and she always had a book by her side. We joked that she had completed War and Peace just by judicious use of her time at red lights.
