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Comment by BJones12 | Hacker News Reader

> It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market.

It seems that any product with effectively capped consumption will become a winner-take-all market. People go to the movie theater 6 times a year, so that's winner-take-all. People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all. People go to approximately 1 university, so while an average university has 200 million in endowments, Harvard has 50 billion (250x). Heck, I'm pretty sure the same factor is leading to the rise of megachurches because people are only capable of attending approximately 1 service per week.

I recall the book Blockbusters by Anita Elberse (2013) being one of the first to point this out.

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> People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all.

It doesn't sound like you know much about the market for books.

>That same 2016 publication showed that on average, Americans read 12 books a year.

Sounds like they may know more than you in this case.

There is nothing approximating a cap at that level. You can easily read five times as many books. The proposed mechanism cannot work.

Note also that the average of 12 books a year is dominated by people who read zero a year, and those people aren't relevant to the market.

Would a figure of 60 books per year change the argument? 100? 200?

There’s a realistic cap on total number of books consumed by a large enough group of people to matter economically.

If you're arguing that the market dynamics are driven by the existence of a cap on consumption, in contrast to other goods, your argument must fail if the cap isn't actually restricting anyone.

There is an infinitely high cap on the consumption of every good. That can't distinguish anything from anything else.

So...

> Would a figure of 60 books per year change the argument? 100? 200?

Yes, that's the difference between the argument being theoretically able to work on its own terms, or not.

>There is an infinitely high cap on the consumption of every good

Huh. No, no there is not. This is why a few rich people don't consume 100x as much toilet paper as you do. The cap isn't how much of the good we can make, the cap is human time and attention, of which time is fixed and attention is a highly competitive market. Simply put people are not buying infinite books and immediately throwing them in infinite fires.

Let me try adjusting for a very low level of reading comprehension:

1. All goods have capped consumption. There are no goods without this feature.

2. The cap might be very high.

3. If you want to argue that one good differs from another good by virtue of capped consumption...

3(a). It is not enough to show that a cap exists;

3(b). Instead, you must show that the cap is actually achieved.

4. The reason for this is that the cap exists for all goods.

5. Books do not come anywhere close to reaching their consumption cap. The consumption of books is just as unbounded as the consumption of immortality pills.

I don’t know anything about the reading habits of Americans, but I know Anscombe’s quartet says that ain’t the whole story, not by a long shot.

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