> 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.
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.
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.
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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.