I’ve been following the WGA strike, which is in part a response to the proliferation of streaming services, whose business models are based upon subscriptions. To keep people paying their $9.99 every month, the studios produce an increasing amount of shows. This results in lower budgets for each show, and the writers often suffer, working harder for less.
A similar logic undergirds many digital journalism outlets. To keep people clicking links, creating large enough page view numbers to impress advertisers , publications increase the number of articles they publish. Or, for those that have a paywall, to get us to pay our $9.99 every month to keep reading. The recent closures of Buzzfeed and Vice have reminded us of the perils of these business models as well.
Meanwhile, as the endless abundance model of streamers and digital magazines has played out an entirely predictable script, an opposite, scarcity model has been working for others, especially in fashion, where drops and exclusivity (and apes) create an artificially exclusive market focused on the manipulation of demand instead of supply.
And book publishing? It is, like television and journalism, focused on supply, supply, supply. There may be—hold on, hear me out—too many books published in the United States these days. Of course, sensing there are too many books is nothing new: it was lamented in Ecclesiastes. But usually that weariness has been focused on endless possibilities to learn and study. What happens when we consider it from a supply side angle instead?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Notes from a Small Press to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.