Creativity Quote by Thomas Perry

"I think we did a great job of putting together a program that would have made good e-books available had people been buying e-books in any real numbers"

Thomas Perry, Musician

About this Quote

That sentence is a masterclass in the soft burn: it sounds like a victory lap, then quietly pulls the rug out. Perry begins with the warm, corporate pat on the back - "we did a great job" - the kind of language you use to keep a team feeling competent and a strategy sounding intentional. But he immediately reframes the achievement as a museum piece: a program perfectly engineered for a market that never showed up.

The subtext is damage control without admitting defeat. By pinning the failure on consumer behavior ("had people been buying e-books in any real numbers"), he shifts responsibility away from planning, timing, and taste. It's not that the initiative was misguided; it's that the public didn't do its part. That conditional clause carries a faint resentment, or at least a weary realism: we built the future, and the future ghosted us.

Context matters: a musician talking about e-books already signals a certain early-2010s optimism about digital pivots, when everyone with an audience was told to "innovate" or die. The quote captures what it feels like to comply with that mandate and still lose to inertia. It's also a sly comment on hype cycles: industries love "programs" because programs are measurable, fundable, and presentable. Demand is messier. Perry's line works because it lets him be both competent and unlucky, a professional caught between the pressure to modernize and the public's refusal to follow the script.

Quote Details

Topic	Business
Source	Help us find the source
Cite	Cite this Quote

More Quotes by Thomas Add to List

About the Author

Thomas Perry (born April 28, 1963) is a Musician from Germany.

27 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"More than four thousand programs produced and consumed. Some of them were pretty good, a great many of them were forgettable; but a handful may even be worth a book"

Ted Koppel, Journalist

"I didn't and don't go to Internet for any business purposes. The book sales for me by this point are way beyond any influence I might have, positively, or others might have, negatively"

R. A. Salvatore, Author

R. A. Salvatore

"Being the first to do something like this also registers a lot of attention that the line might not have gotten if all four books had just appeared from one company"

Mark Millar, Writer

"I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the first book had not sold... doesn't bear thinking about, but I suppose we'd have made it work somehow"

Bernard Cornwell, Novelist

"I became interested in making books, starting about 1965, when I did the Serial Project #1, deciding that I needed a small book to show how the work could be understood and how the system worked"

Sol LeWitt, Artist

"I think that the online world has actually brought books back. People are reading because they're reading the damn screen. That's more reading than people used to do"

Bill Murray, Actor

"We're kidding on that. One of the things I insisted upon when we went into this project was that we are full partners, going fifty-fifty, both on the money and on the say of what's going on with the books"

Robert Asprin, Author

"In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly"

Neil Gaiman, Author

"Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers"

James Earl Jones, Actor

"Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book"

Rudy Rucker, Scientist

"I tend to turn down books originally published as e-books. As for selling books directly to e-book publishers, I would do so only if all traditional publishers had turned them down"

Richard Curtis, Writer

"To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them"

Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher

Arthur Schopenhauer

"I think the varied backgrounds in the beginning were a plus. It took a while for people to understand what they were trying to do and get started, but it did provide for a lot of new ideas"

Jack Kilby, Scientist

"The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected"

John McKinley, Politician

"I agreed on condition that we found a completely new concept that had nothing to do with the latest books"

Bernard Pivot, Journalist

"We are forced by the major publishers to include electronic rights in the contracts we make with publishers for new books. And there's very little we can do about that"

Richard Curtis, Writer

"I'm always prepared for the worst. I was prepared to have the book come out, sell seven copies, and have to keep working in advertising, so it was just great that it was received so well and by such a huge audience"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

Augusten Burroughs

"Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves"

Jesse James Garrett, Businessman

"Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little"

Sol LeWitt, Artist

"There really was nothing like it at the time. We had good ideas for implementation, so we proceeded. I think it was an excellent solution to the reliability issues with existing search engines"

Shawn Fanning, Businessman