I think many folks missed the implications of my conclusion:
There is one more point though: books don’t exist in a vacuum. The implication of ebook sales falling while remaining 20% of the industry is that the industry itself is in decline. Ultimately, in the grand competition that is the market for consumer attention, the fact that books aren’t really improving while everything else is getting better means the publishers may in the end be celebrating the most pyrrhic of victories.
If ebooks don’t really modularize books, that doesn’t mean modularization isn’t happening. Consider this blog: the length of a standard book is about 64,000 words which just so happens to be about how many words I write in a month-and-a-half! Basically, since the launch of the Daily Update, I’ve written the equivalent of about 10 books.
Moreover, the time you all spend reading this update has to come from somewhere: attention is the ultimate zero sum game. By my count I have basically reduced ebook sales by the tens of thousands, in part by breaking up what in the past may have been my book into many component parts. That, ultimately, is probably the true modularization: ideas, not books.
This.
