For many indie authors, ebooks rather than print books make up the majority of sales, often by a wide margin. It's important to remember that this is not true of trad authors, and if we include them, the market becomes very different.
We all know industry figures are inaccurate, tending to underrepresent both indie and ebook figures. So I poked around and found a fairly recent Pew Research Poll.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/06/three-in-ten-americans-now-read-e-books/ It indicates that 30% of people read at least one ebook in the past year, while 65% read at least one print book. 23% listened to at least one audio book. Obviously, there is overlap among these audiences, as the mean is 14 books per year and the average is five. However, only 9% only read ebooks. 32% only read print books. 33% read some of each. (Note that the figures don't differentiate by purchasing methods, so presumably the ebook total includes buyers and KU or scribd readers).
Since all three formats are widely available, those stats suggest that print books, even though they are typically more expensive, aren't necessarily on their way out. (The bibliophiles I know are nearly all fans of print books, reading ebooks only when they have no choice.) And you can't really rent print books, though some people do check them out from libraries. But there's no digital access for physical products, hence no way they fit into the access model PJ is talking about.
With video, the market is more obviously trending toward streaming, as we can see from examination of sales figures in recent years.
https://www.whathifi.com/news/dvd-and-blu-ray-sales-continue-to-nosedive But this article also points out that disk sales are still in the billions, and that vinyl and CDs have both made modest comebacks, which suggests that the movement is more nuanced than a linear trend toward streaming in all things.
As others have said earlier in the discussion, there are forces pulling in both directions. Particularly with video, not everything is available for streaming, and some movies and TV shows are only available on disk. Cost is definitely lower for streaming--one month of Netflix is cheaper than some DVDs. And storage is definitely not an issue. Yet availability if one wants to watch a particular movie or TV show is definitely erratic. I was recently irked when I couldn't finish a 15 season show before its time on Netflix expired. I did finish another 15 season one, only to discover that there are actually 19 seasons, but Netflix only got rights to distribute the first fifteen. On the other hand, Netflix bought the future rights to an ongoing series and is the only outlet for its last two seasons--but the other ones can only be seen elsewhere. If you are content to watch whatever you're offered, Nextflix or a similarly extensive service is a great buy. But if you want to watch particular things, that becomes a much more chancy proposition.
In other words, there are disadvantages to an access-only model. For some things, I'll take access. But when access doesn't give me what I want, then I still want to have the option of buying certain products instead. I would guess many people are the same way.
For books, I was strictly a paper guy until I ran out of space. Then I became more of an ebook guy, but I still buy print in cases where I can't get ebooks or idiosyncratic publishing cases where print is cheaper than e--a situation that still happens more often than you think. But, though I read a lot, I'm not a KU guy. I much prefer to own. As I recall, the last publicly available Data Guy figures suggested that, while KU was huge, book sales on Amazon still far exceeded it.
As far as a new indie platform for books is concerned, I'll pose a simple question. We all know that major trads have all had their issues with Amazon over the years. Yet they never started their own online outlet to compete with Amazon. In fact, one would have thought they could have killed Amazon (back when it was still mostly books) by the simple expedient of not using it. It shouldn't have been hard to draw readers to a Big Five Online Bookstore. If it were the only way to get Stephen King, JK Rowling, etc., readers would theoretically have moved to it in droves. And the Big Five could have offered nice deals to pull smaller publishers in as well, maybe even successful indies.
Yet that never happened. If even The Big Five didn't have the base to compete with (if not destroy) Amazon book sales, why would we expect an indie platform to do better? An indie platform as an additional option for wide authors isn't a bad idea, but I'm sure I see it as a game changer.
