You're as big an ass as he is.

You know, we're seeing the hand of the free market in operation here.

You'd be surprised at what a dedicated amateur can do. Or even a dedicated professional who isn't concerned with making a ton of money. Go look up Bill Nelson, formerly of Be Bop Deluxe.

I think it's the case that people download a lot of crap that they'll then just warehouse and never, ever listen to, and, yes, I think this includes a lot of stuff they would never, ever actually buy. I saw this a lot in the early days of pirate BBSs — and as hard drive space has become chaper and cheaper, people are…

You're an ass, but you do have one point right: adapt or die.

Look, not to impugn your intelligence, but your arguments are badly flawed to the point of speciousness. The music industry has minted money out of screwing artists blind ever since there *was* a music industry (and we're going back to pre-wax cylinder days here.) Some of the best work in art, music, film, literature…

One of the major reasons the industry is due for a collapse, old son, is that they've let costs spiral out of control, and the cost to consumer on the delivery end has been spiralling as well, especially with the 3D gouge. When it costs $250 to $300 million to produce a film, it becomes very hard indeed to generate…

Sadly, as well I know from my years in both the music and film/tv industries, the biggest crooks are to be found inside the companies themselves, and legion are the tales of shady doings.

Nope, because nobody is factoring in the realities of the situation beyond the theoretical losses from piracy — the distribution model has changed drastically, and is still changing. The same thing happened at the head end when technology resulted in it being possible to produce entire glossy album productions without…

Trying to blame declining music industry revenues on piracy alone is disingenuous at best; there's a lot of reasons for it, from poor product to poor marketing to the industry not knowing how to approach the available new markets in a profitable way to the consumers exercising their new choices — whether that's to…

Uh oh, we're going to get the Jim Shooter Chronicles.... Going by current prices on the Marvel hardcovers, this is probably going to clock in around $300 or so.

My not quite ex wife is German, and would chortle with glee every time the subject of Perry Rhodan came up. She read some of them in her younger days, and even as a kid knew them to be gruesome inflictions upon science fiction. For my part, like you I read the English translations in the 1970s. I made another attempt…

Well, apparently the producers of Legends have been saying that. :p

And they're all terrible!

As we digress slightly, your note about carriages and chariots brings up the astounding fondness many people have for the mythologized Victorian and Regency periods. Dear me, but those were terrible periods in so many ways, especially if you weren't one of the gentry.

I swear ol' Potato Face kept 24 alive for several seasons beyond its natural expiration. Also, the actress herself is hilarious.

My god, nobody's ever accused me of conservatism before. I am now sufficiently insulted that you will have to meet me at dawn for a duel with pistols. Well, you'll have a pistol; I'm bringing a rail gun.

Well, there we have an issue too — I can pretty much drain the battery in my Kindle in the space of an evening of dedicated reading. It's not an old battery either. Turning WiFi off helps a little bit, but not that much.

You know, I recently read Nicholas Pegg's excellent The Complete David Bowie in its Kindle edition, having started it in dead tree form borrowed from the library (who I'd encouraged to get it; I just decided I needed to own a copy in some form.) This said, I have a direct comparison. There's something to be said for…

Rubbish. A book is about more than the words, old son, and I tell you this as a writer myself. While many books can indeed be reduced to the words and a semi-attractive cover, a lot of books have design elements that can't be gotten around — they are literally part and parcel of the book. High quality art books, for…