Cory Doctorow:
The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.
It’s a scary thought, especially if you’re personally attached to an old medium like movies, books, records, or newspapers.
The article briefly covers the concerns of newspapers, films from major studios, music labels and artists, and books.
From the section on films:
So, we may be at the end of the period in cinematic history where we can convince investors to pony up $300 million to make a sequel to a sequel to a remake of a movie adapted from a 50-year-old comic book. Which isn’t to say that no one will make these things henceforth — give it a decade or two and there may well be rich weirdos who fund these productions the same way there are lovely old codgers who can be coaxed into putting up the dough to mount 15-hour, all-singing, all-dancing Wagner operas. Not a mass medium, nowhere near as culturally relevant as BBMs are today, but still a going concern as a vanity/prestige form.
That sounds familiar, as does this comment about distraction, from the Books segment:
On the other hand, for many kinds of books — long-form narratives, for instance — reading off a screen is a poor substitute for a cheap and easy-to-buy codex. Not because screen quality is insufficient (if it were, we wouldn’t all spend every hour that God sends sitting in front of our computers), but because computers are damned distracting.
