>>Ah, yeah, the guy who insults us all by claiming we never had an original thought in our heads. Yeah, right.
>
>I don't feel insulted, people can say whatever they like - I am not affected by what another says or thinks. However, I'm not sure he means you never had an original thought - I think he means that you are given an ability to think, or a skill to perform a task, and then its up to you how you use those skills. So you never originated/created your own skills but you might apply them in original ways. At least that's what I think he means.

That's not what he said when I last read his messages. I carefully re-read it a few times to make sure he didn't mean it literally, but he did. Only then I responded to the insult with appropriate action.

But, back to the article from which this all started - the games and the like digital content, and theoretical losses based on theoretical number of items which perhaps would have been sold. I remember from the times when rock music was hard to buy back home, and when the first album you may see from a band you knew for years was "the best of", or other marketing gimmicks. They didn't sell what we wanted to buy, they sold what they thought was sure to sell. And, amazingly, that's where the self-managed socialist enterprise buying the reprint license and the capitalist music industry easily found a common language. I've bought a lot of wrong records, simply because the right ones weren't sold.

Or, a friend of mine in the US, a rather good musician, author - who would have survived as such up to the middle seventies. In this century, however, she managed to attract attention of a few labels, by the quality and specific expression of her music, only to be told by each that she'd have to completely abandon that and play something more commercial. Which is why she never had a contract and sells a few hundred of each album on mp3.com.

IOW, the greed of the music publishers is what stands between the musicians and the audience. They know better than the musicians what kind of music should they play, and better than I what kind of music should I buy. I got offers, at times, to buy any dozen CDs from a list of thousands of titles, and guess what - all the bands I may have been interested in have published the same album. You guessed right, it's "the best of".

Even when they go on the web, you can hardly find anything but the current production. They haven't learned anything about the long tail economy, they still advertise titles which are "out of print", "currently unavailable", "none available at this time".

So on one hand they don't really care what the audience wants, they want the audience to buy what they sell, and as fast as possible. If anything is still sold after five years, it's labeled "cult classic" (no matter whether it's music, movie, series, game, book - all things digital).

For a while I was reading books onscreen, because that's how I bought them - an edition with almost all SF published in Belgrade up to 1998, some 220 titles. Then I started downloading other titles from the same authors, those that I couldn't find in the library. Then I finally had enough money and started buying the new titles from the authors I liked the best (and some not - didn't like them, and had I bought these I'd be really annoyed), but that idyll lasted only a few years. Why? Barnes & Noble, the only surviving bookstore in the area, kept only about half of these authors, and never had others on shelves. But they had lots of junk (4' of Herbert, 2' of Card, 3' of Pratchett, 5' of Star Trek spinoffs, 8' of Star Wars, and about 30% of everything was swords, magic, vampires etc - but none of Greg Egan, Chris Moriarty, Cory Doktorow - never heard of them). So I went back to downloads.

Yes, I could have found these on Amazon, but I just can't stand their webpages. It's worse than walking through a bazaar, all the books are the best, and you can also buy this, this, this ... too much noise.