<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Glen Mehn <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:glen.mehn@oba.co.uk">glen.mehn@oba.co.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im"><snip></div>
The bank analogy doesn't exactly make sense as banks are replacing<br>
something expensive for them (employees, time, and physical space) with<br>
something very scalable and well-understood (web apps). Books switching<br>
to ebook is replacing something well-understood and dirt cheap<br>
(printing/distribution) with something not so well understood (three<br>
major competing formats, a dizzying array of DRM options or not,<br>
personal fears in a declining industry, no standard)<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>So a second hand 10 year old half decent machine is going to set us back circa £250,000 (Not cheap). Believe it or not, the equipment is actually going to need to occupy some physical space. Likewise our finished products are also going to need to occupy physical space until they are distributed. Space is space, whether you a bank or a printer, in fact as a printer your probably going to need more than a bank. Then we have energy use, some 33kW, Maintenance Work and operators, so there's your employees and time which I don't think materially differ too much from banks either. There's also a ton of other work that you'd need to account for whether it be another energy consumer or direct labour, think loading/unloading materials packaging for despatch, order taking and processing staff facilities etc. So actually, I think the bank analogy works very well. In my opinion, there are probably bigger savings for printers than banks.</div>
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