It seems to me that a lot of folks in the previous discussion don't really understand quite what makes Amazon so interesting—and threatening, for that matter—to the publishing industry.
So I'm going to take a stab at explaining.
Amazon was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. And today it's the world's largest online retailer.
I submit that, as with all other large corporations, you cannot judge Amazon by the public statements of its executives; they are at best uttered with an eye for strategic propaganda effects, and at worst they're deeply self-serving and deceptive. Rather, you need to examine their underlying ideology and then the steps they take—and the actions they consider legitimate—in order to achieve their goals.
Now, first, I'd like to introduce three keywords that need defining before you can understand Amazon:
is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: "cutting out the middleman". Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediate (such as a distributor, wholesaler, broker, or agent), companies may now deal with every customer directly, for example via the Internet. One important factor is a drop in the cost of servicing customers directly.Disintermediation initiated by consumers is often the result of high market transparency, in that buyers are aware of supply prices direct from the manufacturer. Buyers bypass the middlemen (wholesalers and retailers) in order to buy directly from the manufacturer and thereby pay less. Buyers can alternatively elect to purchase from wholesalers.
It should be fairly obvious by now that the internet is an intrinsically disruptive force in traditional distribution channels because it makes disintermediation very easy.
Jeff Bezos recognized this very early on, and designed Amazon to be a disruptive disintermediary: to buy wholesale and sell retail, using the internet as a tool to reach remote customers directly. Initially Amazon relied on large warehouses, but as its database expanded they moved to just-in-time ordering, whereby obscure items would be listed as available but only ordered from the supplier when a customer requested one.
(So far, so good.)
But there are two other key aspects of Amazon that we need to understand.
Firstly, it's not an accident that Bezos' start-up targeted the book trade. Bookselling in 1994 was a notoriously backward-looking, inefficient, and old-fashioned area of the retail sector. There are structural reasons for this. A bookshop that relies on walk-in customers needs to have a wide range of items in stock because books are not fungible; a copy of the King James Version Bible is not an acceptable substitute for "REAMDE" by Neal Stephenson or "Inside the Puzzle Palace: A History of the NSA" by James Bamford. But books are bulky—a metre wide galley with books stacked spine-out can hold maybe 200 books on its shelves. It takes a lot of floor space to hold one copy of everything a reader might want to buy. Even a big box store may only have room to stock 20-50,000 different titles. In contrast, Amazon's database can hold millions of titles without Amazon having to hold them as physical stock.
Moreover, a big bookstore that stocks 20,000 trade books has to either sell them or return them undamaged for credit within 90 or 120 days. Someone is paying for that credit: either the wholesaler who bought them from the publisher, or the publisher themselves. (Or the bookstore may take a gamble and pay for the books, then keep them on the shelves until they sell—but this doesn't generally happen because bookstore owners aren't suicidal.) And the availability of that credit is limited by the retailer's plausible ability to pay. Amazon doesn't need to run on rolling credit. They can list everything in print as if it's available, and order it only when they have a confirmed sale. Neat, huh?
As noted, Bezos targeted bookselling because it was ripe for disintermediation. By purchasing from the publisher directly when a customer had already bought a copy, his company could keep its overheads down—and in particular, minimize its warehouse space (never mind the cost of running premium retail outlets and paying shop sales staff). This allowed him to buy wholesale and sell retail, at a big discount compared to the regular retail trade (with their higher overheads).
So. What's wrong with this?
Well, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this way of doing business—if that's all that was going on. But it isn't. So now we come to our two new words:
exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity ... Monopolies are thus characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce the good or service and a lack of viable substitute goods.
Monopolies suck for their customers because they don't have to give a shit about product quality or price: they have you, the customer, over a barrel with nowhere else to go.
A monopoly is a consumer-side problem. In contrast, there is a less-well-known corresponding supplier-side problem ...
is a market form in which only one buyer faces many sellers. It is an example of imperfect competition, similar to a monopoly, in which only one seller faces many buyers. As the only or majority purchaser of a good or service, the "monopsonist" may dictate terms to its suppliers in the same manner that a monopolist controls the market for its buyers.
Monopsonies suck for their suppliers because the suppliers are systematically starved of profits by the middle-men running the monopsony. Which can lead to suppliers going bust, and a reduction in the diversity and quality of goods available (via the monopsony) to consumers.
(It's kind of like inflation and deflation in economics. Inflation is bad; deflation, its opposite, is not good, it's simply differently bad. Similarly, both monopolies and monopsonies are bad.)
And the peculiar evil genius of Amazon is that Amazon seems to be trying to simultaneously establish a wholesale monopsony and a retail monopoly in the ebook sector.
You're probably familiar with predatory pricing. A big box retailer moves into a small town with a variety of local grocery and supermarket stores. They stock a huge range of products and hold constant promotions, often dumping goods at or below their wholesale price. This draws customers away from the local incumbents, who can't compete and who go bust. Of course the big box retailer can't keep up the dumping forever, but if losing a few million dollars is the price of driving all the local competitors out of business, then they will have many years of profits drawn from a captive market to recoup the investment. (Meanwhile, helpful laws allow them to write down the losses on this store as a loss against tax, but that's just the icing on the cake.) Once the big box store has killed off every competiting mom'n'pop store within a 50-mile radius, where else are people going to shop?
Amazon has the potential to be like that predatory big box retailer on a global scale. And it's well on the way to doing so in the ebook sector.
Until 2008, the ebook side of publishing was a vestigial, if not irrelevant, irritation from the point of view of the major publishers—at less than 1% of their turnover it was lost in the line noise. However, as subsidiaries of large media conglomerates, the executives who ran the big six had all been given their marching orders about the internet: DRM restrictions would be mandatory on all ebook sales, lest rampant piracy cannibalize their sales of paper books.
(This fear is of course an idiotic shibboleth—we've had studies since 2000 proving that Napster users back in the bad old days spent more money on CDs than their non-pirate peers. The real driver for piracy is the lack of convenient access to desirable content at a competitive price. But if your boss is a 70 year old billionaire who also owns a movie studio and listens to the MPAA, you don't get a vote. Speaking out against DRM was, as more than one editor told me over the past decade, potentially a career-limiting move.)
But publishers aren't software companies. They just want to sell books. And so they outsourced the DRM to the ebook resellers. Including Amazon.
Amazon has a history of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in loss-leading products and ventures solely to build market share. For AMZN, the big six insistence on DRM on ebooks was a windfall: it made the huge investment in the Kindle platform worthwhile, and by 2010 Amazon had come close to an 85% market share in the ebook sector (which was growing at a dizzying compound rate of 100-200% per annum, albeit from a small base). And now we get to 2012, and ebooks are likely to hit 40% of total publishing sales by the end of this year, and are on the way to 60% within five years (per Tim Hely Hutchinson, CEO of Hachette UK). In five years, we've gone from <1% to >40%. That's disruption for you!
Now, most ebook customers are not tech-savvy. It is possible to unlock the DRM on a Kindle ebook and transcode it to epub format for use on other readers; but it's non-trivial. (Not to mention being a breach of the Kindle terms and conditions of use. Because you don't own an ebook; in their short-sighted eagerness to close loopholes the publishers tried to make ebooks more like software, where you merely buy a limited license to use the product, rather than actual ownership of an object.) So, because Amazon had shoved a subsidized Kindle reader or a free Kindle iPhone app into their hands, and they'd bought a handful of books using it, the majority of customers found themselves locked in to the platform they'd started out on. Want to move to another platform? That's hard; you lose all the books you've already bought, because you can't take them with you.
By foolishly insisting on DRM, and then selling to Amazon on a wholesale basis, the publishers handed Amazon a monopoly on their customers—and thereby empowered a predatory monopsony.
I'm not going to comment on the Agency model which has drawn down the current US Department of Justice enquiry into Apple and the big six publishers. Let's just frame it as a desperate attempt by the publishers to get away from the wholesale model, which was allowing the monopsony incumbent (Amazon) to extort ridiculous discounts from their suppliers. If anything, the agency model simply means selling books the same way they were sold 30 years ago, and the way apps are sold in the iTunes app store or the Android Marketplace. It was unwise to give the appearance of collusion to establish a price-fixing cartel, but whether or not such collusion actually happens is a matter to be decided by a judge in the not too distant future.
I'm not going to lecture you about Jeff Bezos either, although I do want to note that he came out of a hedge fund and he's ostensibly a libertarian; these aspects of his background make me uneasy, because in my experience they tend to be found in conjunction with a social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity. (When you hear a libertarian talking about "disruption" and "innovation" what they usually mean is "opportunities to make a quick buck, however damaging the long-term side effects may be". Watch for the self-serving cant and the shout-outs to abstractions framed in terms of market ideology.)
Anyway, here's the important take-away:
DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it's on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.)
It doesn't matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers' Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon's death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM.
If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit").
And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.
If they don't, they're doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fiction get to live in the Amazon company town.
Great post. The only thing I'd add is this:
either we get to live in an Amazonian Company Town (obscure reference to the rubber industry of a century ago)....
...or crowdfunding sites start getting really popular with authors.
Crowdfunding books would be yet another level of disintermediation between authors and readers. While I can see a huge number of problems with this system (starting with an author saying, "I needed a business license? Shit!"), it's a potential alternative, especially once Bezos starts playing games with supplies and pricing.
This is total BS. There are a number of authors who live outside of Amazon selling DRM-free books (myself included) on their own website. It's not difficult, and is trivially easy to run as a lifestyle business while you're writing other books. Amazon cannot maintain a monopoly on selling books or a monopsony on buying books even if it tried: Charlie Stross himself has a brand powerful enough that his enthusiastic readers (myself included) would be happy to buy from him instead of Amazon.
John T Reed wrote on his webpage on distribution (http://www.johntreed.com/distribution.html): "As far as I can tell, the authors who still go with publishers and distributors lack self-esteem—big time. They are so interested in the cachet among ignorant laymen of “being published” and “being in book stores” that they will give up $100,000 or more a year to get that status.
How psychiatrically sick are these authors? How sick would you have to be to walk away from $100,000 or more a year?
In effect, they are willing to pay that much to be a “celebrity,” i.e., “being published” and/or “being in book stores.”
This is spite of the harm done by abandoning that money to their family, themselves, their retirement, their health that would be enhanced by their having more money and therefore more time for exercise and other good habits."
Unfortunately, Charlie Stross belongs in that category.
Rubbish. There's this concept called "division of labour" that I'd like to remind you of; if I had to run my own self-publishing op I'd lose half my writing time to what is essentially a peripheral activity (from my point of view).
I diagnose a bad case of self-publishing disease here. (There's an echo chamber of folks who think that they can all get to be the new Amanda Hocking. Ain't gonna happen, but they get very annoyed if you point out the emperor's sartorial deficiency.)
Well, isn't this an almost privileged moment in modern commercial history? - we get to see how a global commercial entity behaves in what amounts to laboratory conditions (in the sense that we can see, hear and analyse Amazon's actions as they unfold). I think that global corporations have reached a stage of development which is like a hybrid of cancer and morbid parasitism - corporations are driven by their primitive growth programming to expand, push, corrupt, and devour the surrounding socio/economic fabric, yet a certain self-preservation keeps them (or some of them) from overreaching and killing the host.
How will Amazon develop? And, more importantly, what will be the response of those with financial clout (and a stake in the game)? Is it possible that the big publishing houses might club together to create a global bookselling nethub to face down Amazon?
Very clear. Thanks for explaining.
Cliff.
As always, Mr. Stross, you make a lot of sense.
What do you think about the possibility of publishers selling non-DRM ebooks directly to consumers via their website and/or own mobile apps? Non-exclusively, of course. Seems like it would be a reasonably low-cost hedge against Emergent Monopsony X. Hollywood seems to be moving in this direction with content; i.e. I can stream new "Modern Family" episodes via iTunes OR Hulu OR directly from ABC's website/iOS app.
Lack of DRM from the publishers also means that physical retailers have a chance. (Not a big chance, but it's there. Unlike now, where it isn't.)
Think this gives me another reason for sticking to print books...
Hmm. Well I seem to be buying Kindle ebooks almost exclusively now. Case in point, a few days back I had an opportunity to wander round a good 2nd hand bookshop on the Isle of Wight. In the fantasy/horror/sf section all 3 volumes of the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy were available, albeit foxed, creased, and slightly smelly, for a total of £7.50. Before making a decision to buy, I thought to check Amazon to find I could get the entire series on Kindle for £3.49 , and the author would presumably get a bit too. No contest.
That said, I'd happily buy a Drm free PDF of the next but one Laundry novel via Kickstarter. In many ways, the we pay a bit less but the author gets all the money, and up front to boot, model looks quite attractive from the consumer POV.
The big publishers really aren't geared up for direct sales. Some of the smaller ones, however, are: Baen, for example, with their Webscription set-up have been doing so for over a decade.
The trouble, of course, is being discoverable by customers (and easy to do business with).
The brand of one author is not that powerful. People who own Kindles frequently don't buy from anything but the Kindle store, and in some cases assume that any book not on the kindle store does not exist as an ebook.
And of course, where do you thinh our host got that brand, would you ever have heard of him if his publisher had not marketed his books in the first place? There's a massive amount of labor and money involved in building an audience yourself, and you can't crowdsourse until you have that audience.
In economic terms, "monopoly" does not mean "the only seller." It means that you have sufficient market power and presence that you are largely immune to price changes. People selling a few thousand books a year off their website are not going to impact Amazon in any way. (But let's look at one exception here -- Rowling, who has enough power on her own to get Amazon to change how they worked. And she did it by not using DRM. Anyway.)
As for Amazon not being a monopsony... probably. But it's definitely an oligopsony, and is well on its way to monopsony. (Who does, for example, Tor get to sell to? Only a handful of companies that buy significant quantity.)
And your self-publishing means I've never heard of you. Your book's not next to other books I enjoy in the shops. Amazon don't suggest you based on my purchase history. And of course there's the reputation of people who self-publish to be a bunch of kooks who couldn't get a real publisher to touch them.
And while I'm in a different industry, I do turn away $100,000 because I don't care for the stress and 120 hour weeks. I'm not Larry Ellison and I don't use my bank balance as a way of keeping score in life.
I agree that an author totally self-publishing may be a waste of time/talent, although given that many authors work effectively at below minimum wage when writing novels it's hard to say they are monetarily worse off.
However ebooks without DRM do have an extremely low barrier to entry. Thus, a bit of word of mouth and some good google (or bing) search engine mojo can get another direct ebook-seller to show up easily when people go searching. And assuming the DoJ suit ends up invalidating the clause that a distributor can insist that no one else resell the same book at a lower price, a lot of the monopsony lock in to Amazon goes. Unless of course Amazon locks the Kindle. I think it is unlikely that Amazon will be able to insist that kindles only read amazon bought ebooks (both from a technical and legal/anti-trust standpoint) and I kind of doubt they would be stupid enough to try. After all with smartphones, iPads etc. you don't need a kindle to read lots of ebooks and if the kindle gets locked down then we'll all go an download some other ebook reading app for our non-kidle hardware devices and let the kindles whither on the vine.
Now having said that I do espect Amazon to try and make it more convenient and cheap to use a Kindle than anything else but I doubt they'll get to total market dominance levels. I supect we'll see something more like the Intel/AMD or Microsoft/Apple kind of market where Amazon has betwene 60% and 80% of the market but can't get to 90%
PS http://madgeniusclub.com/2012/04/14/how-the-mighty-might-fall/ is interesting and on sort of the same topic
So... DRM is dead. That's -- that's good, right? We can be happy about the ruling?
I'm sorry -- it's just, it's been so long since I've seen a news article saying things are generally okay and I don't need to be outraged about anything. I've sort of forgotten what it feels like.
Dan, don't worry: it hasn't happened yet. It is still possible that the unpredictable combination of the DoJ, the publishers and Amazon will contrive to bring about a grim meathook future that is dismal beyond our ability to comprehend. There is no need to re-learn what it is like to feel happy just yet.
Is it possible that the big publishing houses might club together to create a global bookselling nethub to face down Amazon?
This would be great, both for established authors, self-published authors and readers all around, but seeing as how it took a multimillion dollar lawsuit brought by the DoJ to get to the publishing houses to even consider doing this does not bode well. They could have done this 5 years ago and undercut Amazon, defanging the kindle right out of the gate. Instead they clung to their old ways and let Amazon colonize the ebook biome. Now they have to fight an invasive predator (the kindle model) and figure out how to stay alive (solvent) during a global economic crisis, all while shrugging off the public perception that they've already formed a price fixing cartel. A global bookselling nethub would be sweet, but if it happens, it'll have to be managed by an independent organization not directly affiliated with the publishers or with Amazon. The only candidate I see who has the infrastructure already in place for this is Google. make of that what you will.
It's worth pointing out that although against the licensing agreement and requiring more than minimal computer skills there are various bits of software that are presented as "e book managers" that can be persuaded to hack your DRMed book (be it from Amazon or most other places) into a non-DRMed form and a different format.
Since I've blogged about doing so, I'm relatively easy about saying I've done it. I read one copy of the book but I prefer the iBooks interface to the Kindle interface on the iPad, so I break DRM and read via iBooks. My conscience is clear - although as yet untested by a judicial system. But I'm not sure how hard it is to do. One of the impetuses behind the recent UK proposed remodelling of copyright law and the like was that middle-England housewives were some of the biggest lawbreakers - doing things like cracking DRM to read on a different platform, lending eBooks to their friends and the like. There are a number of big business cases too but if the law says middle-England is all breaking the law then the law is wrong... or there's a revolution.
The Bezos business model is so incredibly destructive for the publishing industry that I frankly don't see him as a problem in the long run, in any possible scenario.
He's not comparable to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is in it for the very long term. They want to be The Shop, forever, for the entire world.
He's doing essentially the same thing as company towns in resource-based industries. They go to a region, exploit its natural resources to the hilt, and then leave the area completely. The company town becomes a ghost town next to a slag heap, and the owners end up with fortunes.
Once he'll have sucked publishing dry, once the big names are totally dead or have left to concentrate on other media, once there is nothing left but reprints and small indie publishers with tiny profit margins he'll close down the book section and concentrate on more profitable things like selling electronics. One day, years after he's shuttered the bookstore, the small indie publishers will grow, some of them will merge, and a better publishing industry will arise. But in the meantime there will be no big English language publishing industry. It will have been gutted.
That's the hedge fund mentality.
Hopefully, someone will stop him.
Sinon, je vais devoir me contenter de nouvelles publications dans d'autres langues que l'Anglais, pour un bon bout de temps.
I hope the publishers wise up and do something like you suggest, but I would never overestimate the wisdom of business executives. I worked at the Borders bookstores headquarters in the late 90's, and at company meetings, the CEO would gleefully - GLEEFULLY - boast how Amazon still hadn't turned a profit and wasn't a real threat at all.
I can't remember his name, but this was the CEO that they brought out of semi-retirement because his replacement was doing a bad job and he was so great for the company.
Business execs can be extremely dense, and unfortunately underlings all too often follow blindly (or are like me back then and just want a paycheck and don't really care who gives it to me).
I think Piaw Na has more of a point than you give him credit Charlie. I mean sure he's suffering from a case of S-PD that's causing him a to be a bit nutty and insulting but in the long run the forces of disintermediation are going to force something like that to happen eventually.
Of course there is still going to be a division of labor but the structure of that division is going to change. Over the next decade or two the field of editing is really going to blossom when their contribution really makes itself evident. Only I think the authors themselves rather than the publishers are going to be hiring them. Or maybe agents will start taking over more of the back-end work and putting together editors, authors, and distribution set-ups.
I suspect though that eventually authors are going to take on most of primacy in the business mesh the eventually develops. The agency of being in charge is just going to be too attractive. And the fact is that the business crap is much simpler than the goons in MBA programs would like us to believe. Thirty years ago you'd be hard pressed to find a programmer or engineer who could cogently explain a stock option was now it's as much a part of the job as knowing what bubble sort is.
Waves hand
I won't actually advocate violating license terms and conditions, but I'll cop to doing so myself (insofar as if I buy a DRM'd ebook, I think I'd be mad not to strip the DRM and make an archival copy strictly for my own future use).
I think the interesting comparison to be made here is to Steam; PC games went through this whole drama 5-6 years ago and the market not only survived without either a monopoly or a monopsony but is being dramatically revitalized. But DRM is still alive and kicking.
Of course, Valve is not Amazon and the Gaben is no Bezos.
Is it possible that the big publishing houses might club together to create a global bookselling nethub to face down Amazon?
You mean, form a cartel for the express purpose of raising prices and weakening a particular competitor?
I worked at B&N in the early 00s, when the CEO said that he didn't care what we sold, books or hammers, because it was all widgets to him. I think this is closer to Bezos' business model than anything else. He'll sell book-flavored widgets for as long as there is a market for it. And despite all the articles claiming otherwise, there still is a huge market for book-flavored widgets in the English speaking world. The traditional publishers have an opportunity to wrest control of the selling of these back from Amazon, if they are smart. As you point out though (and as I and others can attest) they aren't smart and so will probably do something mind-numbingly stupid.
The agency of being in charge is just going to be too attractive. And the fact is that the business crap is much simpler than the goons in MBA programs would like us to believe.
The angle you're missing is risk management.
Right now the industry is structured so that the publisher assumes the commercial risk of publishing: the author is along for the ride, and under some circumstances makes less money, but the iron rule of publishing, Yog's Law, states money flows towards the author: you don't have to pay for the expenses of publishing or marketing, you get a nice fat advance against your expected royalties (which you don't have to repay if the publisher doesn't turn a profit, or goes bust), and so on.
I am, as it happens, in a position where I could go from zero to self-publishing on a commercial basis in a handful of months. This is entirely deliberate: I have a "Plan B" to hand in case the publishing industry as a whole crashes and burns. But I'd rather not do that, because if I do, not only do I have to shoulder the workload of being by own publisher, I also have to assume the commercial risk.
(And I'm a child of a long line of self-employed entrepreneurs and business owners; it must be infinitely worse for someone who didn't grow up in a family where everyone was expected to run a business.)
Interesting read. I hope that publishing industry learns a lesson that Hollywood and the music industry have not learned, people will pay for content if it is easy to access and reasonably priced. Sorry MPAA $9-18 for a CD is ridiculous and forcing movie theaters to convert to 3D and charge $15/ticket is just stupid. Get rid of the DRM, find a way to easily search and download content. People will buy.
One of my hobbies is fountain pens. Amazon has been sucking in the small Mom 'n Pop pen sites as 3rd party sellers. Of course these stores disappear and Amazon takes over. I've avoided buying pens and supplies through Amazon, because I do not want Amazon to have the same market share it now has with e-books.
I like DRM free ebooks and being Canadian have been using ePub readers first a Sony and now a Kobo Vox.( Kindle was not available) With the vox I can download reader software to read any format and have actually bought one book from AMAZON. Yes they have basically locked down the US market and are making in roads to the rest of the world but if everyone else can start selling DRM free before they do it may disrupt their business. I dislike locked sandboxes and therefore have avoided Apple and Amazon.
I really don't see DRM as anything but a distraction in this conversation. Having DRM doesn't force users to go to Amazon, and choosing to have DRM books on Amazon doesn't preclude having non-DRM books elsewhere.
Amazon owns the marketplace because a) they doing a pretty good job of running the marketplace, and b) they have scale. If libraries did half as good a job as running a marketplace, I'd get all my books for free from the library. But they don't, and so I discover books on Amazon, read reviews, and 9 times out of 10, purchase there.
As a self-published author who hasn't run afoul of Amazon yet (yes, I know, there are lots of horror stories), I'm pretty happy with the opportunity afforded me. I'm keeping a large portion of my book revenue (far more than I would with a publisher), and my sales are to the point where they can pay the rent. My Amazon sales are 97.7% of my total sales, so I certainly can't afford to live without them.
I assert that if you don't want Amazon to be the only game in town, then the trick is to build a better marketplace. It has nothing to do with DRM.
A better marketplace would likely involve a system of reviews shared among many smaller marketplaces. Imagine all libraries, independent bookstores and publishers sharing one large review database.
It would likely also involve a good recommendation system, like Amazon has. This can itself be crowdsourced, much as Netflix did with the Netflix Prize (a $1 million prize to beat Netflix's movie recommendation algorithm back in 2007). The recommendation system would need to have the ability to recommend items across marketplaces as well as within marketplaces. This can and should be transparent so customers can see when they are about to transfer marketplaces.
To keep friction low and offer an experience similar to Amazon, every part of the experience should be kept smooth and seamless. Checkout and shipping, for example should offer a centralized option, like Paypal that remembers payment and shipping information, although nothing would preclude a participating marketplace in the federation of marketplaces from offering their own payment options in addition to the common ones.
Unfortunately, I don't think we can count on the publishers to lead the charge. I've seen publishers speak at SXSW Interactive year after year, and they appear to be further and further divorced from the reality of the situation. (If you've ever been to SXSW Interactive, you may have noticed there's a lot of very smart people there. When the presenters are too busy being defensive against what the audience is saying to be able to stop and listen, it's a sure sign the presenters are in trouble.)
Personally, I'd like to see libraries lead the charge in building the marketplace. We don't have to doubt their motives: they just want to get books into people's hands.
Except that history doesn't end once Wal-Mart drives the small, expensive retailers out of business. If they jack up the prices, they sow the seeds of their own destruction - and they can't keep selling goods below cost forever. Wal-Mart is an apt example of that, because now they're scrambling to deal with the threat posed by Amazon to their DVD/BD and "High-End" product sales.
I pointed this out in the earlier thread, but let me re-iterate it: without government regulation, private sector monopolies are not long for this world - especially in anything related to the Digital Economy and Retail. They are ripe targets for disruptive innovations and changes in how we produce, sell, and market goods and services.
Yet this kind of fear-mongering turns up, over and over - that this time, it's different. This time, we're at dire risk of ending up in the "Amazon company town", in the grasp of Microsoft, trapped in AOL-Time Warner's "walled garden". I think it's as wrong now as it was with all the prior times when it came up.
thank you. well explained. many moan about the big companies and what they do, the Evil Empire and so on. to me, these are capitalists behaving like capitalists. why do people get so outraged? do we really expect them to be different? do we expect these structures to suddenly grow bigger moral wings and fly above their modus operandi? we can look the other way; what happens when a country tries to control the economy? we have the absurdities of the old USSR. yes, maybe we will have an Amazon style Company Town; but I bet its own internal contradictions will bring its demise and some newer form will emerge with good and bad. . . . and there is where my hope rests, new forms emerge. every time I see a Company Town, I look behind it to see what is coming next. sometimes it is hard to see but it will be there and when it is not, we are all dead.
Interesting piece, as always.
Steam is an interesting analogy, and indeed the biggest contrast with Amazon is that it seems to be run by people who to some extent care about the products they sell (and the same is true for some of the other digital pc game stores). But the scary thing at the moment is not Valve, but it's customers. The customers that seem to be really prone to voluntary vendor lock in. Partly a trust issue, partly a convenience issue, partly a social issue, but in the end there is a big group that won't buy directly from a developer or competitor, only from Steam. Which is something that I assume also happens with people that feel fine within the Amazon ecosystem (or Apple for that matter). And all those people are highly unlikely to take a chance and buy direct, making the dream of independent authors successfully selling directly or at least independent from the big sellers less likely.
I'm not sure Bezos will ever abandon publishing, because he's set up a nice long-tail company that can make a tremendous amount of money, though having lots of small sales.
No. We don't know what will kill Amazon yet. It may well happen after Bezos is gone, but something will happen. And it's going to be an astoundingly stupid move, whatever it is that happens.
My favorite example of this phenomenon is nearby, where a local Korean grocery store is moving to take over an empty Sears big box nearby, and turning half the floor space into a mini-mall to sublet out to the restaurants, small shops, and hair salon that they already sublet to in their existing building. A century ago, Sears was a huge player in the catalog retail game all through the US. Now they're drying up and blowing away.
It's interesting to watch a Korean copy of a Japanese model (I'm not sure who the original was for this store design: Mitsuwa?) take over as a former giant falls apart. That Korean store is successful enough that it's already turning into a local chain.
If you flip through old Baen books, you will see Jim Baen had a keen interest in exploring options other than the usual distribution chains right from the start.
It's not about DRM or a company store or locking people into a platform
Amazon is a technical company and knows that DRM is not sustainable and the things like kindles are going to drop to about $25 very fast and they are in the end not going to come from Amazon.
It's about being the biggest and the cheapest, driving the price down, pressure the suppliers to the point where the margins are razor thin and the biggest and most efficient retailer wins due to technological and economy of scale advantages.
There is a real possibilities this will turn into a nightmare scenario for authors. They need to work with Apple, publishers and surviving retailers to develop their own distribution channels, that are COMPETITIVE on price and efficiency. It's not as hard as it sounds delivering a few million text files for pennies is child's play these days
..If libraries did half as good a job as running a marketplace, I'd get all my books for free from the library...
As a librarian, I'd like to give this statement an award for the most poorly thought out analogy of the week, but I'm a librarian, and we don't have the funding for awards. Or keeping the lights on more than four days a week.
Right. Does anyone believe that Bezos' ambitions for World Domination (Bwah Hah Hah Hah) are unique to him? That Walmart and Toyota and BP et. al. don't desire exactly the same monopsony/monopoly combination?
Maybe there's something to the notion that A-Z is uniquely situated to actually realize this state of affairs. But I haven't seen that argument made yet.
Good points.
My guess is that somebody will come along with a new, successful business that directly attacks the heart of Amazon's business model. Amazon, like earlier giants, will struggle to respond, spend a ton of money trying to adjust without luck.
If they're lucky, they'll end up like Microsoft or IBM - successful companies that produce a steady supply of products that people want, even if they're not the Big Man of the Tech Sector anymore. Retail is pretty unforgiving, though, so they might just go out of business.
There's also the example of A & P, a supermarket chain that had a 75% market share as recently as the 1950s. I'm guessing that your first reaction (and most people's reaction) to this is "Who?".
I think it apropos at this point to remember that for many people, ebooks aren't "owned" per se; what they own is the right to view a given title. Not the same thing.
Of course this state of affairs creates incentives for jailbreaking and creating a version of your acquisition that makes it actually, you know, yours.
You can buy a Kindle and use Calibre to convert .epub to .mobi. This was you get a nice e-reader and damage AMZN (assuming they sell Kindles at a loss).
Once he'll have sucked publishing dry, once the big names are totally dead or have left to concentrate on other media, once there is nothing left but reprints and small indie publishers with tiny profit margins he'll close down the book section and concentrate on more profitable things like selling electronics
Bullshit. You are missing two strategic points: 1) don't leave a flank, 2) code is law.
The first is obvious, the second means that intellectual property, such as it is, is not the same thing as a mountain full of coal.
That said, I think we live in disruptive times. If it wasn't Amazon, it would have been someone else. I like the current publishing model, but I don't think it matters what I like. I'm simmering some half-baked ideas (I couldn't pack another misplaced cooking analogy in there, which is why I'll never be published) on how one keeps authors whose names are not Rawlings or King both writing and not living under a bridge. Scale is a problem. I'm wondering it talking to authors, who likely know their local booksellers, pubs, coffee shops, etc. might be an angle. (That's part of the publicity angle; editing, art and finance are the other 240% of the problem. Honestly, finance, I think, is the easy part, assuming the rest comes together.)
Crap, I fumbled the HTML. Sorry.
Hat is tipped. This is a brilliant post.
Suppose we find ourselves in the amazon.com grim meathook future. Shouldn't authors be able to come up with a few ways to collectively organize themselves to better survive?
I'm thinking something like a foundation or cooperative or guild that could run an author-friendly alternative to amazon.com's ebook storefront? Something run with an explicit mission to forward the mission of authors rather than enrich middlemen? Is such a thing possible?
IIRC you have an agent already. What's to prevent your agent, and other agents, from turning into mini-publishers? A 5-man shop could handle that division of labor for you and a stable of other authors as well.
Didn't look far enough. Bezos wants to disintermediate between authors and Amazon. What are these pesky publisher things between us and the content creators? swat
And another level of monosomy forms. With many more, much weaker sellers...
SFWA and the other writer groups need to have some serious Come to Jesus talks about which set of corporate overlords they want to work for and under what conditions ten years from now...
The publishers need to compete with Amazon on distribution. Seriously, it's that simple. Stop crying into their beer about the good old days, stop the shady backroom deals, stop waiting for the government to save them, and just compete. The people that are doing that (B&N, Apple) are doing fine. Amazon is in now way unbeatable.
I know its been like a 100 years since they have had to do that, but most of the rest of the world does it every day.
If the big six publishers cannot get their shit together then the authors are going to have to find someone else to represent them or do it themselves.
My guess is that somebody will come along with a new, successful business that directly attacks the heart of Amazon's business model.
I'm not sure what the heart of AMZN's business model is, but I suspect their cloud services have a lot to do with it.
No comment.
And another level of monosomy forms. With many more, much weaker sellers...
This is why I [heart] the big publishers. Well no, not really, but having a handful of competing, cumbersome, slightly inept, and not terribly voracious sauropods for a market beats having to sell to a market consisting of a single psychopathic tyrannosaur.
There's that, since that's where they make their biggest profit margins.
Supermarkets don't squeeze out the smaller shops by predatory pricing, while they sell at prices that the smaller shops would lose money at they don't lose money themselves in doing so. They are actually better at retail than their competitors. They have intrinsically lower costs due to having better lower cost logistics and better quality stock. When I was at university the TESCO Metro was much nicer (better lit, nicer decor &c.) with far more fresh food than the similarly sized independent supermarkets. Even when the small shops have gone out of business the other supermarkets provide ongoing competition or potential competition as the barriers to entry aren't that high. If TESCO are making exceptional profits in a local market ASDA or Wm Morrison or J Sainsbury or one of the various smaller retailers are going to see an opportunity.
"I really don't see DRM as anything but a distraction in this conversation. Having DRM doesn't force users to go to Amazon"
Actually it does, you cannot read a DRMed book on a Kindle unless that book was bought from Amazon, and you cannot read a DRMed book bought from Amazon on anything but a Kindle.
Yes there are non DRMed books, but as Charlie points out, books are not fungible, and books that come with DRM are (usually, I've seen a few DRMed public domain books) not avialable any other way.
I immediately thought of O'Reilly.
They produce one of the largest lines of technical books on the market and being smart people have been selling their books DRM free for years. (They are watermarked though, to discourage reposting).
Their market, of course, is tech knowledgable people who are quite capable of cracking DRM so they can use the books on multiple devices. So O'Reilly accept and embrace that.
Bad news though. A quick check shows that Amazon sell kindle versions of the O'Reilly ebooks at half the price of the ebooks on the publisher's website.
I'm not so sure. The reason is that the Kindle physical platform is a bit of a technological blip. It basically exists because reflective screens are nicer for reading books - the competitor is smartphones and tablets. And on my Android phone, I have both a Kindle app and a Google books app. I've bought titles on either. I strongly expect smartphones to displace physical Kindles for the same reason they displaced Palm Pilots, they are near enough and good enough and you already have one. And once they displace kindles, the market for intermediaries opens back up.
What that means is the book industry becomes a collection of Amazon-alike data silos, whether run by Amazon or the publishers directly, that contain books which refuse to transfer between silos but are otherwise able to exist along side one another.
As for Amazon getting in trouble, I can see roughly four serious problems for them.
Amazon has a serious cloud crash, and spends the next few years afterwards in legal hell trying to get out of paying for it. Unfortunately for them (and us), they're big enough to be a target in cyber-war, but it doesn't take a day-infinity exploit when a disgruntled employee, cascading power outage, or major earthquake can probably do much the same thing.
Amazon gets sued by the DoJ for being scary, and broken up Ma Bell style (yes, that's sarcastic).
Amazon gets sued by the DoJ, but the real reason is that they refused to make nice with the American National Intelligence Apparatus (this for the tinfoil hat crowd. Distinguishing this one from the last one will be difficult until after the fact).
Something seriously disrupts international commerce, be it a human pathogen, war, a Snow Crash level computer virus, or whatever. Yes, this sucks horribly for all of us, but I think it sucks even more horribly for firms whose profits depend on cheap and fast supply chains, like WalMart and Amazon.
I wish I was as optimistic about the publishers giving up on DRM. But business people have an imperfect record of following their own long term self interest.
It does seem like a slam-dunk argument to abandon DRM: if they do, they can disintermediate and sell directly.
Interesting possible confounds: (1) they let Bezos lock up a huge number of their potential customers --- "just throw away your Kindle and buy from us on..." what? I suppose iPads work, but letting AMZN and B&N lock up so many customers wasn't clever. (2) it could lead to a game of chicken over the physical book sales.
One elephant in the room that rarely gets talked about when the big monopsonists, AMZN and Apple are discussed is customer service.
I wouldn't argue that these companies are perfect, but the experience purchasing from them is wildly better than most of the alternatives. Barnes and Noble (and the late Borders) killed almost all US independent book stores, and I can tell you from unfortunate experience that their notions of customer service are some combination of infuriating and pitiable. It's hard to imagine them surviving much longer. Consider cell phone companies (at least in the US), big box retailers (again, in the US), and airlines. The experience is simply better with these two than most of the competition, unless you can afford boutique-y alternatives.
Somehow these companies have managed to get very large without acquiring a financial framework that confuses consumer happiness with "unacceptable drag on profits."
I'm nervous about the concentrating trends, too, but there's a reason why retail consumers buy from these vendors, and it's not just network effects. The alternatives are almost uniformly bad. Maybe it's time for CEOs to dump their Jack Welch Six Sigma porn and think again about their customers.
@William
I agree with the host that DRM is key: just look at the music industry. There's no major seller of DRM encumbered music left.
Mainly though, it's not that easy. Netflix never used that algorithm they crowd-sourced http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/04/netflix-never-used-its-1-million-algorithm-due-to-engineering-costs.ars?clicked=related_right
O'Reilly is a great point of comparison. They have done one thing that the publishers seem to have flubbed completely: I buy a copy of the physical thing, and they offer to sell me a very deeply discounted copy of the e-book.
I have often wondered why, if I am willing to buy a first edition hardcover, the publisher wouldn't offer to throw in a PDF or other ebook.
I note by comparison that this is something that many periodicals will do: buy the expensive physical subscription and you get access to the web site free.
I'd be happy to participate in an offer like this, since it gives me the nice feeling of supporting the author more (by buying the hardcover) and the convenience without feeling exploited ("what? $20 for a book I don't even own?")
Enjoyed this article a lot. I have two comments, neither exactly germane.
(1) I don't think Amazon is in the book business at all. I think they're in the customer data business. Anyone who has seen those "recommended for you" lists at amazon.com, or noticed that Amazon remembers the address of everyone you've ever sent a gift to, knows what I mean.
(2) I don't think Amazon is a villain. On the contrary. I'm an O'Reilly author. Amazon sells the printed version and Kindle versions of my books at a discount, but I just take Amazon's price to be the actual street price. What matters to me is that Amazon gives me huge publicity benefits and makes my book readily purchasable.
1) "don't leave a flank" You're so extremely, perfectly obvious to yourself that I have no idea what you mean there. I'm an imperfect person and I can't understand secret ciphers.
2) Intellectual property like a novel comes from a source that has to be nurtured, processed, treated in a continuous fashion. Sure, it's more like farming than coal mining but in the end all that remains is also a dry wasteland, if you take a profit-only attitude and suck the land dry.
Charlie Stross can survive because he's got the computer smarts and comes from a family with a long tradition of entrepreneurship. But you don't have a breathing, living literary culture with a single author, or even two or three.
Bezos isn't into monopoly or monopsonies for the same reasons as Walmart or Toyota or BP, or IBM. They have all concentrated on one specialty each and they want to dominate the world in that specialty, forever, really forever, after their founders are long dead. This means that they want their suppliers to actually survive and also have to try for quality at times.
I used to think that Bezos also was willing to ensure some kind of quality, sometimes but over the last years he's flooded the bookstore with worthless self-published titles in both non-fiction and fiction. Watching for quality means some kind of gatekeeping and Bezos has revealed recently that he isn't at all into any kind of gatekeeping. He won't abandon book sales next year but he'll drop them presto when the sales flatten. I'm hoping that his sales will flatten before he's reduced English language publishing to a wasteland of reprints and translations.
Wow. This is one of the best rundowns of the situation that I've seen, and that comes from someone working in ebooks for a relatively sizable publishing company. Thank you for this, and for the suggestions on how to manage our position. I think in one sense it may be too late to change our dependency on Amazon, but I am hopeful that the agency model won't go away (if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, I know, I know).
The difference between the wholesale and agency models is vast for us, and it really has damaged us to be stuck with wholesale with Amazon (and it doesn't even make sense! Amazon isn't buying ebooks in bulk! It's one master file that's copied!).
I'll try to advocate for this around the office.
Yeah, but Amazon bought mobipocket reader and gutted support for the software on anything but their hardware. As I'm still cheerfully reading all sorts of books on one of the last general purpose computers sold, a Sony Clie TH55, I'm at a dead end because the formerly inept but occasionaly responsive support for mobipocket is now just a huge swamp of blogspam. Amazon ate it and turned it to shit.
Charlie, I think this is generally pretty insightful about the nature of the problem, but I'm not sure you've actually got your finger on the solution.
Yes, ebook DRM is probably doomed in the long run, but it is very likely too late for that change to have any particular effect on the dynamics of this market. Ironically, the best example of this is the other big Amazon-vs-Apple showdown, over digital music. The Amazon music store launched selling unprotected high-bitrate MP3 files with the labels' blessing at the same time that Apple's contract with the labels still required them to sell DRM music. Then a few months later, Apple was able to drop their DRM as well. The upshot of this dramatic leveling of the playing field was...
...well, fuck-all, really. Amazon spent an enormous amount of money to claw themselves a 13% share of the online music market, while Apple still sits happily on a 66% share. (Google, Sony and a handful of bottom-feeders round out the remaining 21%.) And despite the presumptive portability of the files themselves, the vast majority of those files are still played on iPods and iPhones.
Sometimes getting there first with a product that is "good enough" is all it takes. In theory I should be annoyed about the various bits of DRM and licensing lock-in, but at the end of the day I can click a button, pay $10ish and have a book pop into existence simultaneously on my phone, tablet and laptop. The best that Apple and B&N have been able to offer against that so far is "kinda the same thing, only a little worse in one or two aspects." As anyone who went up against iTunes in the music business over the last decade can attest, that's not a story that gets you much traction.
As public libraries and even the world class research libraries are getting dumped and abandoned by the communities who fund them in the first place -- even when the citizens of the communities fight to keep them -- and the institutions with which the research libraries are associated in the second case --
And, further --
as back catalog print books themselves within these facilities have disappeared in collaboration of themselves with google's digitization project and amazon's distribution and control of digitized new books --
We will left very soon finding our info only on --
two very large monopolies that control it all, google and amazon, and you will have to pay for it even on google --
Unless what you need for research is on Gutenberg, perhaps --
And if --
you can afford an internet service fast enough to download, when the corps make the different tier system a reality -- fast enough if you can pay for it.
Information no longer wants to be free, it wants to be paid, and paid for through the nose of the researcher and reader, because both the publishers and the consumers were too helpless to figure out something else viable.
The future in not equally distributed and neither is the fun of it.
Love, C.
Anyone who ever thought amazon was a benign entity, has never read the accounts of what it's like and always has been like to work for them. They are worse than wal-mart, if you can believe that. Sweat shops, literally, among other horrible treatments -- and they Do Not Pay A Living Wage -- not even the minimum wage, because they know how not to.
Love, C.
Very nice rundown of the issues.
I think there's an important distinction between having a monopoly and being able to exercise monopoly power. The first is legal, the second is not. Amazon has used predatory pricing as part of a range of strategies (lock-in) to garner a large market, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Where it becomes a problem is if in the future they can earn monopoly rents, i.e. can set higher than normal prices in the ebook market. I'm not an expert in the area, but ebooks, particularly DRM-free ebooks seem like a highly contestable market, which would make exercising monopoly power difficult.
Absolutely agree -- not to mention it displays utter ignorance as to conditions of libraries' funding -- thanks to many factors, but none of them as far as I can see have been created by librarians at all -- they are far and away the most responsive to changing conditions their communities of any entities, whether public, government or private, as in university libraries. But they've always been starved for funding and what funding they receive is always ear-marked by the funders for physical things that have nothing to do with books, much less salaries for professionally trained people.
It sounds like my brother who rotely repeats, "if such and such private business behave like such and such government something other blahblah," when in the breath just before that he was complaining how his corp's project is completed FUed because the private business vendors they're dealing with are so FUed up.
If e-book DRM is dead, where's the DRM stripper for Apple e-books?
Yes, this is my purely selfish angle into the subject under discussion, but I'd kind of like one. As you note, Kindle customers have back doors for unlocking their purchases, and I suspect that Amazon doesn't care as long as the back doors are more of a hassle than one-click purchase. Apple should care even less (they have my money for the hardware), but the forces that cracked FairPlay for music and movies seem uninterested in doing anything about books.
Hi Keith,
I'd love to understand why my analogy is so bad. My local library offers me the ability to reserve books online, at no cost, and to pick them up at my local library when they are available. They have a reasonably good selection of books. The system works when you know the book you want ahead of time.
However, what they don't offer is a good discovery experience. (And this is what Amazon excels at.) I can go to the Amazon site, and within a few minutes discover new books that I'm sure I'll be interested in. The combination of effective search, good description, abundant reviews, and a powerful recommendation engine guarantees that with five to ten minutes research, I can discover new books to read that I'll really enjoy. And the process is frictionless: I can pay for and ship my book with less effort than it takes for me to log into my library account.
This combination of discovery plus low friction is what makes Amazon powerful.
None of that has anything to do with DRM.
(Yes, DRM may be doomed, but it's still mostly irrelevant to the relationship between Amazon, publishers, authors, and readers.)
The reason I bought up the library is simply to show how powerful those features are: I'm willing to pay for a book at Amazon when I could get the same book from the library for free. I think that's a relevant discussion point. If you want to break Amazon's lock on the industry, it's going to take something pretty powerful to do it when even offering the content for free isn't enough.
Hi Arthur: If you go on to read the article, Netflix does use the algorithms from the competition. It started doing so even before the competition ended. It doesn't use the winning algorithm in its completeness because of the computational cost relative to the incremental benefit. - Will
FairPlay for ebooks was cracked earlier this year. The tools are out there. HTH.
Charlie, I don't think you've read it right.
Imagine, in a fit of not-being-dicks, that the big publishers got rid of DRM tomorrow. What changes?
Well Amazon still owns the shopfront to the customer, and the books the customer 'owns' on their kindle are still locked in (for the great unwashed).
Imagine the big 6 publishers pushed their own bookstore, with books minus the DRM so they could be put onto the kindles, etc. They are still doing nothing that really hurts Amazon, since they are more steps away from the customer.
In short it's not till they STOP selling to Amazon (or charge them more, or delay shipping to them) that anything changes - and doing that doesn't really require getting rid of DRM. You can bet that Bezos would scream blue murder about being cut out, as would authors who would see less sales.
Amazon is out to remove the big publishers from the game entirely. Amazon will setup a workflow where authors can publish directly with them (already doing it to an extent) and they will woo big authors to their services. The big publishers will implode, and since they tend to be held by conglomerates, losses will be cut.
Can the big publishers save themselves?
Well, I'd suggest there is one, small, possibility. People are tending to move towards tablets for book reading, and away from eInk. Whatever some may think, the lure of a general purpose consuming device outweighs the value of reflective display. That dislocation switch gives the publishers one small chink of opportunity. If they create a reading/shopfront app for the tablets (sideload for Kindle) that offers a storefront/reader AND a 'get the eBook version of your paperbacks for free', they can wipe out Kindle. Short of that, they'd have to take the no-sale-to-Amazon route, and I think they would get court cased to death.
The best opportunity to not end up with a company store, however, is for authors to accept the big publishers are doomed and take ownership of the publishing arena. What I'm thinking of is an author-owned entity that creates (owns) a turnkey solution for an author, any author, publishing their wares. This would manage the workflow, integrated with the selling AND the author<>reader CRM. In essence it would automate the tiresome tasks for a small fee - manuscript goes in/money comes out. It could also manage the up-front funding via a kickstarter type affair - although I think future potential authors are probably going to have to shoulder more of the up front risk, no matter what. Such an approach would require some big names to join to provide credibility.
The reason I think that's the best possible practical solution is that the only people who really value books are the authors and readers. Agents do to a degree, but the further you get along that workflow, the more it's just shifting watermelons. Thus it's the authors and readers that are going to shape the best solution, and they probably have to realise this and take action. Otherwise it's going to be no good in 5 years time whining that Amazon will only pay you 10% of the sale price - sheep get slaughtered.
Oh, and Apple would be as bad - they love lockin. If you had to have a big boy involved Google would be the closest to trustworthy, and even then...
Surely not because it's two clicks instead of one?
Re publishers and direct sales: I had an interesting conversation with a textbook person from BigCo X yesterday, implying that they are working on it. BigCo Y has already noted that it, and its peers, are working on a common online interface. Not all good news: My warnings about amazon were met with a response which implies the publishers aren't about to drop DRM. On the other hand, they saw Apple as enemy number one: I get the impression that apple's scorched earth approach to rights is making amazon's labour camp model look superficially attractive.
Amazon are of course capable of selling non DRM open format stuff: the money I give them gladly buys me MP3s, which is nice.
my sales are to the point where they can pay the rent. My Amazon sales are 97.7% of my total sales, so I certainly can't afford to live without them.
Bing bing bing! And that's the problem. Since your comment didn't follow this up, allow me to. You are utterly dependent on Amazon. They pay your rent... because right now they give you 70% of the sales price. Now, if they achieve a monopoly position, they can invert the percentages and keep 70% for themselves and give you 30%. Boom, your income is less than half what it was.
Before you say 'but they wouldn't do that..." I'll ask... why not? By definition in this scenario they have no viable competitors. What are you and other authors going to do? There's nowhere for you to go if Amazon is in a monopoly position. Stross can tell Amazon to, er, perform carnal acts upon themselves and sell from his site. You and most authors probably won't be in that position.
A few things: First, the existence of scatter-shot individuals hawking their own wares does not constitute a counter to an erstwhile monopoly.
Second, using yourself as an example when some of your own books are sold via amazon somewhat dilutes your point.
Last, John T Reed is not an unbiased expert in these matters, as he has a financial interest (selling his own self-published books on how to self-publish books) in providing this particular view, along with numeric estimates that seem rather inflated. I would no more trust his thoughts on self-publishing than I would trust the the real estate advise of 3am t.v. commercial real-estate "tycoons" hawking their opinions on the advantages of "no money down" real estate purchasing for the low low price of whatever they can squeeze out of you.
Predatory pricing only makes sense if you can subsequently exact monopoly rents, this requires that there be fairly high barriers to entry as otherwise the extraordinary profits of monopoly attract competitors, some of whom have deep enough pockets to outlast you. Predatory pricing is expensive so you need to be making very large abnormal profits in order to make up for the substantial losses you suffer while doing it.
One reason the competition authorities are fairly blasé about price wars is they are inherently self limiting and in the short term benefit the consumer by lowering prices. They take a much more negative view of cartels and monopolies as they directly and immediately harm consumers by raising prices and can be sustained indefinitely.
A lot of that technology already exists in the form of version control software, forum software, wikis and online, collaborative word processing software. Sourceforge is a very good example of how this might work.
What still needs to be done is for someone to code the business logic so that a wanna-be author can upload his/her manuscript and say, "Here's my first manuscript, I'll give 40% of the profits to one editor, one copy editor, one artist/layout person, and one publicist, as follows: ..." while being able to trust that the software can track these details appropriately. That way everyone associated with producing the book gets royalties and hopefully upfront payments are not required.
Ideally the software would also price the book appropriately given the author's/book's popularity and make it possible for fans to get discounts/rewards for paying into a project before it goes on sale. In other words, my first novel starts selling for 0.99, while Charlie's next opus starts at 12.99 (or whatever) with both books rising or falling in price as their popularity demands. Once the initial surge of interest in the book is done the book would move into "oldie" status with some kind of cheaper price.
I wish you will proved to be correct re: DRM being on death row.
But doesn't that outcome depend on the 70 year old billionaires who own the publishing houses being not idiotic enough to avoid committing suicide? Given that they bought into DRM the first time around, it's not clear they will be smart enough to say yes to breaking DRM this time around....
Heck, the MPAA and the RIAA are still up to their same old tricks of antagonizing their customers... they tried to push SOPA, and you can bet that they will be trying to push son-of-SOPA as soon as this year's election season is over.
So while I wish you are correct, I remain somewhat more pessimistic about the publishing houses not being able to avoid committing suicide. And if so, authors will either have to get used to living in the Amazon company town, or finding other ways to get their products out to consumers.
Hmm, sounds a bit like Economy 2.0!
(Actually maybe a bit 1.5-ish... 2.0 always gave me the impression of peer-to-peer predator micro economies coalescing into an emergent macro econo-fuck)
I'm with Theodore Ts'o on DRM. There's really no reason to believe that the publishers are going to be able to see their way to giving up on DRM. They are so used to managing a business model based on scarcity that they are simply unable to envision a business model that accepts frictionless digital copying.
For my own small part in this, I've pledged to correct anybody who says "buy an ebook" because as all of us here know, we're buying nothing.
Nice assessment of the situation. As to Amazon's business strategy, I think a big part of it comes from being born in the early years of the Bubble. The company wants to sustain a high level of growth to keep its stock value high. This means sales and growth are more important than profits, and that they have to be very concerned about Wall Street perceptions. Once you stop being a growth company, your stock value -- which depends on market perceptions of future growth prospects -- will drop. How much depends on how much real sustainable the company has.
It'd be great if DRM on ebooks actually died, but I'm not holding my breath.
Many content distributors in many industries can't get it through their thick skulls that we'd be happy to buy their stuff if priced and presented reasonably. If people buy things now, even if they could just download it, why would they stop if DRM were removed?
I have a hard time hating Amazon: they provide a pretty good service, in some cases unique. Who else will sell me ebooks all over the globe? Almost no one at the moment.
More than that Alex, there are lots of ways in which the way things are published can be revolutionised, neither publishers nor Amazon are particularly customer focused in their approaches there, I'm thinking. I'm not going to go into detail here, since the IP has value elsewhere as well, but the general model has much to offer in terms of true disintermediation terms.
Finally, a point to consider. You suggest that the book start off at a high price, and then drop. Consider the options for the reverse to happen, and what it would mean in the sales model ...
Nice to hear you talking about the Amazon epub situation Charlie. Publishing right now seems weirder and more turbulent than any time in the 30 or 40 years I've been involved.
In February I decided to go for it and figure out how to make my own ebooks, porting some titles to the EPUB and MOBI formats.
This is, as you say, something of a second job and an immense time sink. Being a lapsed computer programmer, I've enjoyed it, up to a point.
A publisher or, for that matter, my current literary agency would be willing to do the port and distribution, taking of course a certain cut of the putative royalties. An ebook being an easier sell to a publisher than a print book these days.
So what I did so far was to make two books that would in fact be hard to sell and hard to put into print, due to their excessive lenght---these are my "Complete Stories" and "Collected Essays," live on my Transreal Books page, www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks
I'm selling them direct as well as through Amazon and B&N. When I get my now-depleted energies together, I'll put up a blog post explaining some of the methods and gotchas I've learned about.
As for novels, sure, I'm still hoping to continue placing my novels with "real" publishers, at least for now.
An upside with ebpub is that your book isn't so likely to become unavailable. Also, as mentioned, the book can be as long or as short as you like. And you can include color illos.
Side remark: One new gotcha I just noticed today is that Amazon charges $00.15 per megabyte of your book's length per sale, this comes off your royalty. So for a ten megabyte book (which might include, say, a hundred illos), that's $1.50. So you need to charge a bit more for the heavily illustrated volumes.
Of course the big box retailer can't keep up the dumping forever, but if losing a few million dollars is the price of driving all the local competitors out of business, then they will have many years of profits drawn from a captive market to recoup the investment. (Meanwhile, helpful laws allow them to write down the losses on this store as a loss against tax, but that's just the icing on the cake.) Once the big box store has killed off every competiting mom'n'pop store within a 50-mile radius, where else are people going to shop?
I have read many descriptions of this phenomenon, but are there actual, documented cases of this happening on a wide-scale? Or even an individual scale?
(A side note: minor typo in bold, possibly: did you mean "competing?")
I know people have brought up Steam several times. The interesting thing about Steam is that they don't always have the best price for "Steamworks" games. Case in point this RPS weekly feature [url]http://www.shacknews.com/article/73324/weekend-pc-digital-deals-the-darkness-ii-for-1249[/url]
So maybe there's a way for publishers to sell on the amazon platform (or any platform) by rotating deals. They could do something wild as well, like send in your physical copy of a book and for a reasonable price get a non-DRM E-book (probably a pipe dream) but it would help the post office too :)
Sorry, guess I don't know the code for posting a url.
Mr. Rucker, I've enjoyed "Complete Stories" quite a bit. Thank you for doing that.
Chris: different industry sectors. Textbook publishing and trade fiction publishing bear about the same relationship as building turboprop short-haul airliners and freight locomotives.
Having said that, this in no way invalidates what you say about textbook publishing.
Your analogy fails because libraries don't have the money to compete with brick and mortar bookstores, let along Amazon's just-in-time delivery model. There are a number of reasons for this but chief among them is taxes. All those free services you love aren't free. They are paid for by local and/or state taxes, depending on the library. As you may have noticed, we've been cutting taxes here in the US for the last 30 years and now it's reached the point where some cities can't even keep the street lights on or staff fire departments, let alone fund services like the library.
Libraries are caught int he middle of a perfect storm of bad policies and trying to do the best they can but they need funding (in the form of taxes). The ALA has zero clout when it comes to publishers and we're just observers in this particular fight. Once there's a ruling we'll adapt the best way we can, so long the cost is minimal.
Getting rid of DRM would allow libraries to invest more in ebooks as it would make cross platform lending possible. But the publishers don't want that and neither does Apple or Amazon. The only ones who do are the customers/readers and some authors. And they are the last to be considered.
Consider the options for the reverse to happen, and what it would mean in the sales model ...
Hi Ian,
Perhaps I didn't communicate very well, so let me make my idea clear: John Smith puts his first book, an S.F opus titled Surfing the Higgs Boson up for sale. The software knows he's a new author and therefore prices his book at 99 cents. Fortunately, John's a very good author who hooked up with the right publicist, editor, and artist, so he sees decent sales. The site software determines that the sales figures justify a higher price and increases the cost to $2.99.
Surfing the Higgs Boson gets good reviews from John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton, so sales increase dramatically and the e-book site increases the price to $5.99. The author gets a movie deal and the resulting publicity drives the price to $10.99. Once Meryl Streep announces that she'd like to play the female lead, the book becomes a best-seller and the site software prices it at $15.99.
Once the hullabaloo dies down, the book goes on the backlist at $3.99. Now that he's a best-seller, John Smith's next book goes on sale for $9.99...
I'm guessing you live outside the UK.
Visit virtually any High Street in the UK and you will see nothing but chain stores. Heck, I could show you the empty shops round the corner from me that once housed family businesses.
And as a for the supermarkets - their tricks with land banks alone are frequently enough to shut down the competition.
(For an example - well lets name one, the Swan Centre development in Yardley Birmngham nuked the local business, and last I looked the damn Tescos hadn't even been built - they'd just bought the land and demolished the old shops).
It's not just the booktrade. The whole economic system seems to be designed to encourage monopolys, unethical practices and gouging. Certainly it penalises those businesses that don't.
Rick - I agree completely. Did you think I was somehow arguing for Amazon's postion? No way. I'm completely in agreement that having Amazon in charge of the entire marketplace is bad.
They just happen to do a really good job of creating that marketplace, so it's going to be a challenge to beat. It's not just the pricing, not just the monopoly position, and not just the amazing user experience, but all of those things together.
It's always astounding to see what grave misconceptions about Libertarianism are still in circulation.
Say, Mr. Stross, how could we, who strive after universally improved social cooperation, possibly exhibit social Darwinism? Considering your earlier, fairly specious comparison between the England of Dickens' time and our proposed ideal state I can't help but think that you let ideological bias cloud your view.
I would be delighted to see another one of your essays on this topic, though, as I figure this would be the perfect opportunity to disabuse any misconceptions.
~Bieser
Dave, #71: I'd like to say "no, of course I'd just go get it from the library", but unfortunately it's just not true. If it was two clicks instead of one, I'd do it. But it's a login to another web app that won't keep me logged in, plus some tricky searching because the ISBN numbers are never the same, because the title search doesn't work well. It's ten minutes of friction.
My background is in web design, so I know pretty well the cost of any friction. The reason Amazon defended their one-click system so long is that it's worth billions of dollars in incremental revenue.
As an author, I do like to buy books too. I am supporting the author after all.
And please, I'm not trying to slam libraries here. I understand the funding problems, and I know that the vast majority of libraries get their software from one of a handful (two?) companies that provide it. My point is not that libraries are doing something wrong, but that Amazon is providing a very good customer experience, and that's the biggest challenge we would face in trying to replace their monopoly/monosoly.
Alex,
Yep, there's also "bid to be one of the those to get the first edition a week early, 5000 places only", or individual prices depending on customer specifics (buy lots - you are an opinion former - get it cheaper), or "buy now, goes up to $10 tomorrow", or 'money off for spotting a typo', or indeed having the 'backlist' price actually being higher again, since those buying will be those who specifically want it.
The whole thing gets much more interesting and adaptive in the ebook world - different authors could employ personalised, customised and targeted models specific to their wants - but first they have to grab back control.
The whole idea could also be applied to music. I've got a day job and a side project already or I'd be coding this stuff right now...
"grave misconceptions"
My mind boggles.
Perhaps you could point to a working libertarian utopia so I could understand how such a wonderful system works?
Otherwise, it's no more meaningful than those who complain that they problem with communism is it hasn't been tried properly...
Thanks Charlie for this excellent explanation of what Amazon is up to and what publishers could do about it. You may even find yourself being quoted in court by the Apple/publisher representatives.
To which the judge will reply with the legal equivalent of "Well that's nice but it's got bugger-all to do with this case so shut up and sit down." Amazon haven't been colluding to raise prices, so they're not under investigation no matter what else they've been doing. At best, some minds within the DOJ may start thinking about what else they should be looking into when this is over.
The DOJ investigation is also going to make Plan C no DRM tougher. When Apple first dropped DRM on iTunes music, prices went up. (And yes there was no technical reason to do so - music execs compensating for "piracy" ?) Not an encouraging precedent if the book publishers try to remove DRM all at once.
And suppose Amazon don't remove the DRM even if the publishers want it?
Great analysis.
I only bought a single Kindle book before I found a way to remove DRM. Now my standard practice is buy a (Kindle) book, remove the DRM, export it to epub, and then upload it to my Dropbox account. Then I can read it on any computer or device I own - Mac, iPad, Android smartphone, Nook tablet, etc. And I can reasonably expect access to it for my lifetime, since ePub is an open format.
Consumers will be in for an unpleasant surprise when they try to switch away from the Kindle platform, and realize that DRM is locking them in.
I learned my lesson with DRM music from Apple. I love Apple, but hate DRM, and realize they had to use DRM to get the music labels to cooperate. But until they dropped DRM, every album I bought, I burned to CD and then ripped back as MP3 so I actually owned it free and clear.
And by the way, although I like the iBooks app for iPad, I have only bought a single book from iTunes - as soon as I realized there is no known way to remove the DRM, I was done buying ebooks from them. So now I often read my "Kindle" ebooks on iBooks on iPad as ePub, and that works very well. But I'm not locked in anywhere, which is what I demand.
I just see ebooks as a little behind that same curve. It can't change soon enough, to dropping DRM.
And by the way - notice no mention of piracy. I don't do that, i.e. "sharing" it with others. But I have the right to remove DRM from any ebook or other media I own, for my own use.
Charlier @50 & Patrick @46. Eloquent non comment.
(maybe this is trading one evil for another...)
Just idle curiosity - how much effort would it take for Bing/Yahoo/Google to scan their page index, figure out "this page has a DRM-free book for sale", put a standard wrapper page around it, then a soup-to-nuts site with a storefront, reviews, buy with your Google Wallet, samples, a "customers who liked this liked"....
Okay, so that's "Google Play", but with several missing parts - the biggest of which is only having partial catalogs from some of the major publishers. Include the self-pubs. The books that the publisher didn't buy and are sitting on the author's web site. The "hey my rights reverted back to me and I've redone them and am selling them for $5" gals. And, like you said earlier, Charlie: no-DRM. Your book has DRM?
Google "Requiem 3.3 drm Brahms"
(continued since I hit enter too early) Your book has DRM? Oh, sorry, we can't sell it. We will watermark, but no DRM. Then include an easy way to load them onto your ereader (including the kindle), or your tablet, and (hopefully) voila.
I think it's only fair to mention that when internet shopping was just starting out, a LOT of companies tried there hand at it. And they were bad. Really, really bad. Amazon was one of the only (possibly THE only) company that created a online shopping experience that didn't absolutely suck. And IMHO, Amazon is still the nicest place to shop online. I will actually start to try to buy something online, and then give up in frustration because I can't find it on amazon, and everyone else's shopping site is so bad by comparison. So give them some credit for innovation please. They made a darn good shopping site, while competing with a ton of other companies trying to do the same.
Good points about ebooks and DRM though.
Interesting as hell, but the only time I got into ebooks was when I figured out that ** allowed me to get several gigs worth of ebooks.
Most of which are madly out of print, or ridiculously overpriced (there's a few authors who only publish out in TPB, and, well, ahem, I won't share my opinion).
DRM is already pretty much dead. I have more books than I could read in a lifetime, right now. 10 gigs?
I do still stick to buying the books I enjoyed. Nice to be able to lend out, and supports the author.
"business crap is much simpler than the goons in MBA programs would like us to believe." -- Yes and no, IMHO.
I know that an MBA is trivial to earn compared to a M.S. or PhD in Mathematics or Physics or Biology or Computer Science. I know because I ghost-wrote two MBA dissertations for Fortune 100 executives, from a major Business School. Grey area ethically, but they could NOT use the degree to get a job for which they were not qualified; they had the big bucks job already. I was a writer; money flowed to me; I learned what a MBA was, without paying tuition.
In The Closing of the American Mind, a 1987 book by Allan Bloom, he says (I paraphrase from memory) that an MBA is not a genuine academic degree, but pretends to be one, with the sweetener that it allegedly increases your income. By analogy, he says, imagine a degree in Sexology, that allegedly gives you better orgasms.
However, real business complexity emerges in earning a DBA -- Doctorate in Business Administration.
I think that Charlie's right about Amazon to first approximation. It is the second-order effects that we don't yet know, and that's DBA-level analysis, or professional Mathematical Economics.
There's another possibility, instead of jettisoning DRM the publishers use the threat of doing do to force Amazon into giving them better terms. Amazon still makes lots of money but the publishers get to keep a slice. Less apocalyptic but it doesnt really impact customers (us) very much.
I think Dean Wesley Smith and C.E. Petit (Scrivener's Error) have taken swings at answering that question. It's good exercise to go back through their archives and
One correction I may make, having been there not long after the company came out of the garage. The decision to sell books was arbitrary and based on their regular shape and predictable weight, in addition to your "virtual" catalog theory. As company lore went, Jeff was driving from NY to Seattle in the same Civic he used for years into Amazon's existence, trying to think of what he could sell on the web.
At some point, the scales fell from his eyes and he realized the advantages of books. I'm sure there's a monument in South Dakota somewhere.
Keep in mind where the web was in 1994. This was a long shot and required a bigger investment than today but not as big as five years later.
The other thing to keep in mind is that you're thinking too small. This isn't a conspiracy about reading material. I submit that Jeff, who is smarter than all of us (I went to AMZN after working at MSFT, where I had the scary experience of meeting Bill), is working at a level one or two levels above where even the most paranoid are looking.
I wouldn't be surprised if Jeff's secret goal is to achieve Singularity in space by 2030. That isn't my guess, but that's the scope you should be considering.
"Amazon has the potential to be like that predatory big box retailer on a global scale. And it's well on the way to doing so in the ebook sector."
Potential is not actuality. If Amazon engages in predatory pricing, it should be prosecuted for such. That is against the law.
"It was unwise to give the appearance of collusion to establish a price-fixing cartel"
Clever of you to downgrade the accusations, but in point of fact DOJ appears to have a strong case that publishers were in fact engaged in collusion, which is illegal. And, in point of fact, carries potential criminal penalties. They should count themselves lucky that DOJ has chosen to pursue purely civil remedies.
So let's see. Publishers have engaged in an actual conspiracy in violation of antitrust law. Amazon might do so at some indefinite point in the future. Goddamn, Amazon sucks massive time!
I'm no fan of Amazon and its penchant for DRM, but someone broke the law here and someone else didn't. Trying to prove how someone who didn't break the law did break the law is bullshit. You should shut up about that.
I think you might be missing the middle. That is, we have the USA at one extreme, and the USSR at another, and yet there are a great many successful industrial economies which take a middle path. Germany, for instance, has laws on worker representation on company boards. They're not collapsing into chaos from that. There are different systems of paying for healthcare, different levels of regulation on banking, and all these systems, when looked at with a stranger's eyes, can look rather frightening.
I am pretty sure that, under the American system, I would be bankrupt and dead. I could be wrong, I am looking from the outside.
Is the typical American any more likely to be right about other countries? It's easy to point fingers at the Soviet Union, because their system lost. We don't have that indicator for other industrial alternatives.
Does the long tail really exist?
It gets argued about, thats for sure. I've seen claims both ways. It's a selling point for Amazon that you can find the obscure that might never appear in any physical bookshop. Some of it is good though specialised, and other stuff is just rubbish: we're seeing that pattern with ebooks. At what point does Amazon decide they can cut some of that tail off?
The ideas of ownership and of control overlap. It's worth remembering that there are a lot of variants short of complete ownership, but most of us never encounter them in our lives. Many of us rent homes, rather than buy them, but we make a single payment for an ebook, and that biases us to ownership as the status.
A library where we paid a fee for each book, that might be a model that we could handle. But I think the publishers might struggle with that. They come close with their attempts to limit how a library uses an ebook, but for it to work the "library" has to charge the reader. It needs new thinking all through the chain.]
There are at least two sides to how Amazon appears. For the customer, they're pretty good. You can find what you want. order it, and it gets delivered.
I've looked at Amazon as a prospective ebook seller. They distribute from Luxembourg and exploit EU rules to minimise the tax they pay. But they pay me from the USA and embroil me in US tax law. They're acting as a US publisher, and the overheads in dealing with both the IRS and Britain's HMRC are intimidating, for the likely income. Charlie gets a payment from his US publisher, and has to go through similar procedures, but he is dealing with sums counted in kilobucks.
If I felt my ebook would earn kilobucks, I could give you the link for it now, but from my point of view as a potential supplier, Amazon are pretty ugly.
Two different viewpoints on the same company, two different answers. Charlie isn't somebody buying books, so what a customer sees—easy searches, and reliable payment and delivery—is secondary. Anyone who retails books has to provide that. Any author wants to sell his books to a distribution and marketing system which doesn't rip him off.
I could say the same about Anarchism. It was, in 1920s USA, something of a political bogey man. And there were certainly individuals who called themselves Anarchists who fit modern definitions of terrorist.
But it is a rather broad label encompassing some rather different philosophies with some common roots.
The impression I get is that Libertarianism and Anarchism both depend on a respect for others. They both need a means short of violence to resolve disputes. And neither can work in the environment that has arisen in the USA, where the judicial and legislative systems have been corrupted by the greedy. Then you see a few who call themselves Libertarians, who worship at the altar of Ayn Rand and exhibit an inability to see others as people which is typical of a young child.
My liberty should not imply your slavery, but that seems the unavoidable outcome of Libertarianism in the current USA.
My first ebook reader was a Sony PRS 505. Lving in austria I bought my ebooks from Waterstone. I was forced to Amazon when waterstone (and the UK publishers) decided not to sell any ebooks outside the UK. As there arn't many other alternatives for english ebooks to AmazonI didn't have much choice.
I invest about 30 € per month in ebooks and I always remove the DRM from the ebooks I buy. This is the reason why I also don't buy any ebooks from Apple. Besides I enjoy reading my books on epaper.To be honest since I own a kindle the probablity for me to buy a book instead of getting it from alternate sources has gone to nearly 100%. What Amazon gets right, as Apple got it right for music, is the ease in getting new books and the unobstructivness of the DRM scheme. I can read the ebooks on my kindle, Ipad and iphone without haveing to worry about the DRM.
Whenever I can I'm buying my ebooks DRM-free (Baen, Angry Robot). But when the book in question is from a big publisher mos likely Amazon is the only option for me. It used to be Fictionwise, or Diesel but not anymore. Why? Because of the OTHER crippling factor called "geographical restictions". I can live with DRM (let's not get into details why or how ;-)). But when every non-Amazon ebook seller says that I cannot purchase book X because I have not the privilege to live in the USA I have no choice. Even at Amazon not every book is available for me (but more and more are), and those which are have their prices inflated by the cost of "free wireless delivery", but at least they are aware that world does not end on USA border. So Amazon may be The Source of All Evil and Jeff Bezos - The Devil Incarnate, but as long as they will be the only ones selling me ebooks I will be buying from them. Plain and simple.
I've never heard of you or your books.
But I'm glad you are making a living.
This DRM nonsense is exactly why I only buy e-books from Baen Publishing directly. No DRM on any of their e-books and they take into account when pricing that selling an e-book does not require the purchase of paper and ink, a major expense when publishing physical books. They are formatted for most e-book readers and are even available as RTF and HTML files that can be read on any computer in a word prosessing program or web browser. I absolutely refuse to purchase any e-book priced the same as its hardback counterpart. And since their e-books have reasonable pricing, I can preview them before deciding if I want them in my library of physical books. And I do own many of the books in both formats. More publishers should follow thier example of using e-books to drive their physical book sales.
Stopping doing something stupid is really difficult for companies or organisations or governments, and only slightly less diffciult for individuals.
One day we may learn to be better at it.
DRM, MPAA, war on drugs, Tory economics, whatnot.
The scientific journals are a different market, I think, but the current row of scientists (and medical doctors etc) versus Elsevier et al and the evolution of PLOS One and other journals where the payment comes from part of the research grant rather than from the (library in which is sitting the) reader could be presented as contravening Yog's Law. And probably will since everything anyone can think of against it seems to be being passed around in an unedifying Cnut-like effort.
But actually the money flowed from the funding organisation, the grant-givers, toward the authors, before being disbursed.
Self-publishing by sicientists is another collection of problems.
That's what Microsoft tried to sell - a word-posessing program.
(sorry - not picking up typos, it seems germane to this argument, perhaps it was subconscious)
It IS about DRM. Amazon's proprietary .azw file format is not an open standard and can only be read on the Kindle. What is less well understood is that although Kindles can read the standard .ePub and .PDF formats, they can only read ePub and PDF files without DRM.
What this means is that anyone who reads ebooks on a Kindle is locked in to the Amazon system - not only can they not (legally) read their Amazon books on another device, they can't read DRM'd ebooks from other suppliers on their Kindle. So it's all very well for publishers and others to bleat about how terrible it all is that Amazon have a monopsony, but as the article states, this is a problem of the publishers' own making.
Getting rid of DRM would allow libraries to invest more in ebooks as it would make cross platform lending possible. But the publishers don't want that and neither does Apple or Amazon.
The real roadblock wrt. ebooks in libraries is that the USA does not have a Public Lending Right framework. Nor, given the way libraries are [locally] funded is it likely to get one, which means publishers will continue to see libraries as cannibalizing direct sales for the forseeable future.
(Note that editorial folks know about and value libraries because you don't end up in that job unless you were a voracious reader as a young 'un, and you don't end up in that job if your goal in life is to get rich. But big publishers are subsidiaries of large corporations run by bean counters who don't necessarily share these values and, even if they do, are required to prioritize the bottom line.)
Oh, and even if the US enacted some kind of PLR scheme, it would need to be funded, which brings us round to the library funding problem again.
Which is frustrating, because the advantage of a PLR scheme for ebooks is that it would allow libraries to reduce the amount of physical space needed for some physical books -- most likely the mass market fiction collections -- and focus their physical floor space on reference collections, community computing services, and other valuable activities. But I digress.
Shorter version of my thoughts on libertarianism (which are not new and have taken some years to gel):
Libertarianism, like Leninism, is an attractive, internally consistent ideology which provides a prescription for achieving a utopian society populated entirely by frictionless perfectly spherical human beings.
Lenin and his followers tried to achieve their goal by, well, the political equivalent of chopping off all the spiky extrusions and compressing people into vaguely spherical shapes. We've seen how well that worked, and most of us said "no thanks". The trouble with Libertarianism is that because we don't have a clear, recent historical example of a Libertarian nation built on the same pile-of-skulls methodology, Libertarians can apply the "no true Scotsman" argument when defending their fundamentally broken model of human behaviour. Which is why they're so tiresome and persistent.
TL:DR; don't trust ideologues who come bearing attractive theories that over-simplify human behaviour.
I know @42 has already been well beaten up upthread, but I just have to ask: Has anyone else heard of the world-famous multi-best selling author "Rawlings"?
(Here endeth the sarcasm)
Two points.
I do business with some of the big six; it therefore behooves me not to pre-judge the outcome of an on-going lawsuit against them. Hence the circumlocution. If you carefully read my words you'll note that I am not offering any opinion as to their guilt or innocence.
You do not, ever, tell me to shut up on my own blog. Automatic yellow card. Do it again, and your ass is banned.
Charlie, How does the UK PLR system benefit the publisher? I know payments go to the authors. Do they also go to the publisher? If not, this could be one reason for the publishers attitude towards libraries and eBooks.
Frank.
The UK PLR system doesn't benefit the publishers, true. In an ideal world, this would be addressed.
Alas, that's not going to happen under the Tories. They've axed the PLR agency, reduced the budget for payments to authors, and going by my 2011 PLR payments, UK library loans are down 30% from 2010-2011 -- probably due to library closures due to central government cuts.
Please actually talk, and listen for a change, to actual libertarians. You have made some hateful remarks that show your ignorance.
Whenever accusing whole groups of people of venal intent, based solely on holding political or economic positions you disagree with, consider it may be a sign of your ignorance and not their evil.
Scott, I regularly chew over politics with a local libertarian[*], in the pub, every week. I know plenty of libertarians, have been shooting with some of them, and I'm not accusing them all of venal intent: I'm accusing them of having an ideology based on a fundamentally broken model of how human societies work.
And don't get me started on Objectivism, which is to Libertarianism as Pol Pot's happy fun followers were to bog-standard vanguard party Leninism.
[*] This is Scotland; he's the only native-born libertarian I know here. If he'd been born in backwoods Texas he'd be a doctrinaire Little-Red-Book Maoist.
Yes, and I would add to that that the current crop of international publishers are led by bean counters who haven't bothered to look at statistics correlating book sales and the presence of well funded public libraries with tons of books in them.
Decade after decade the statistics showed that towns / cities with large library systems and a regular input of "fresh" books were towns / cities where book sales were the greatest and prosperous bookstores were numerous. Towns / cities with small or nonexistent library systems (regardless of the level of income of their populations, since there were rich suburbs who opted to keep libraries out in order to keep their property taxes low) were also the places where book sales were the lowest. Readers would discover a book through a library and then want to own it, or they would discover it through a friend who borrowed it from the library (even if they would never set foot in a "stupid" place like a library)and then want to own it. Libraries created a reading environment in any community they served.
Before the rounds of publisher fusions and buyouts by huge media companies the North American publishers were run by people who knew all about readers and reading. They knew that libraries weren't competitors to bookstores, but an integral part of the book buying environment. They actually courted libraries. Most of the large North American publishers had a special department for dealing with libraries in general and library systems in particular, offering them discounts, advance review copies, etc.
The current attitude of big publishers towards public libraries is insane.
You are correct. I should also note that second hand bookshops also correlate with readers. (Mostly with readers who are too poor to buy books new, but who are enthusiastic enough to want to buy books. Like, oh, my 14-year-old self ... and s/h bookshop customers who get jobs that give them a discretionary income usually move on to buying new books by the authors they like.)
The point you omit is that the big "publishers" aren't publishers in the traditional sense ("companies that live or die by publishing and selling books") but are long-established cross-media conglomerates where the top levels are so divorced from the street-level view that ... well, try to imagine Mitt Romney hanging out at your local library or haunting a second-hand bookstore, then imagine a boardroom full of his ilk.
That's quite fascinating, and matches everything I've heard about him from other sources.
(It also creeps me out a little, because I find his moral framework -- to the extent to which it is expressed through the company he has so successfully built -- abhorrent.)
Not entirely sure what incorrect positions Charlie holds on libertarians...
When one of you can either show, or explain how such a society can work with real human beings I, for one, will stop being snarky about it.
"... well, try to imagine Mitt Romney hanging out at your local library or haunting a second-hand bookstore, then imagine a boardroom full of his ilk."
I can't even imagine Mitt Romney sitting down and reading a book, not a single one. The possibility that he would read two in a year or go to a bookstore (or have a flunky go to one for him) boggles my mind.
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/11/30/mitt-romney-reads-two-books-a-year-apparently
I would also think the same of the members of cross media conglo boardrooms.
The only billionaires I can think of who actually set time aside in their schedules to sit down and read books are Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Charlie, in your FAQ you recommend that people who want to buy your books search Amazon for them. Is there another online retailer you could point me to that sends a bigger cut of the money your way? I'd like to pre-order the new Laundry book, but would like to avoid Amazon if I can. (I live in a town with no bookstore, I don't drive, and I don't work near anywhere near a bookstore either. So my options are kind of limited.)
It would help if you could tell me which country you live in.
Perhaps the functions of publishers need to be disaggregated, at least in discussion if not in reality.
There's the administration side of things, which you've estimated would take 0.5 of an administrative type person for 0.5 of an author, and which others on this thread have suggested could be done by fairly small teams of people for small groups of authors. That's probably a reasonably solvable one, in any case.
There's the risk management side. Assuming that the major risk is that the book doesn't sell (rather than cost overruns), that can be solved with something like Kickstarter. The traditional publishing way could also be separated out, or at least spelled out: an investor buys out a fraction of the future income stream of the book. Cash for equity. No need to entangle that with all the other things publishers traditionally do, at least in principle.
There's the discoverability and gatekeeping function, which is hard, but probably solvable given the Internet. Reputation systems are the Next Big Thing, after all, and have been for years if not decades. The biggest danger may be a tendency toward monopoly / oligopoly effects, as with the scientific publishing system (where their gatekeeping role now seems to overshadow their role in disseminating the results of scientific research), but that's by no means an inevitable outcome.
These are all rather off-the-cuff suggestions, but I suspect in any discussion of the future of publishing, it's probably better to disaggregate these aspects (and possibly others) rather than treating publishing as a single, amorphous blob. In the long run they will probably re-aggregate, but quite possibly in a different configuration.
This is the approach taken by Barry Eisler, a spy novelist who famously walked away from a $500k contract from a legacy publishing house to self-publish. In the end, he didn't self publish, Amazon's new publishing arm picked him up. But he's decided that, in his case, the various functions publishers provide - editing, copy editing, cover design, publicity - are things that he can do better if he hires contractors. Eisler himself is probably an edge case, but his view of disaggregating publishing is a very smart one.
D'oh. Should have said, I live in Scotland. Thanks!
Again, that's only one aspect. What about the other two I mentioned? What about the commercial risk, did he just carry that himself? How about the discoverability and gatekeeping function?
Well, if you're in Scotland, why not ping Mike at Transreal Books? It's the only real SF specialist bookstore in Edinburgh (or Glasgow -- unless you count Forbidden Planet), and Mike can arrange to get me to drop in to sign books before shipping. Or, if you're visiting Edinburgh, you can find it next door to Greyfriars Bobby!
If he's getting $0.5M advances, he's very much in the 0.1% (or even 0.01%) at the top of the greasy pole -- that level of advance yells "New York Times top 10 bestseller". In which case, the risk calculation is very unusual.
Pretty much nothing, I expect.
Most of the casual readers I personally know buy a new book, read it, and then give it away or toss it in the trash. Reading the same book twice isn't on their radar. (and a majority of those people only read new books; they wouldn't touch a used book with a stick)
If their locked-in reader device stops working, all they've lost is the book they are reading at the time.
If you both read books more than once and keep more than a handful of books, you're out there on the edge of the demographic curve with people who talk to giant invisible rabbits.
My thoughts exactly Spriggana. I use a Samsung tablet for ebooks with quite a few different readers including kindle loaded. I have a large ebook collection, however the only company I 'buy' from are Amazon, because they are the only ones that will sell to me. I'm quite happy to support the big 6, but they have to start selling to me first.
I think Charles Stross is right on the money when he says that a lot of people don't realise the potential threat Amazon represents. It is clear that the intent of Amazon is to establish a monopoly and to also be the only market for the suppliers of books -- being authors and publishers. What other goals could they have? Without the publishers in the equation, where is there any competition in terms of royalties and advances? As an author, Amazon makes you an offer, and all you can do is accept. Yes, arguments can be mounted for self-promotion and self-publishing electronically, but does the average book buyer trawl the internet for these publications at present? No, because time is a precious commodity and Amazon provides the largest and easiest to navigate interface. And don't underestimate the desire people have to store all their books on one interface. It's the equivalent of having one bookshelf in your living room, rather than three piles of books in different rooms. This in itself creates a 'switching cost' for consumers to move to another platform. Amazon already have a huge first-mover advantage, in that they've already conquered the ebook marketplace by being the first to get in. And if authors aren't being paid, then the quality of writing across the board will fall. It's naive to believe otherwise. You only have to look at the proliferation of self-published and barely edited titles on Amazon at the moment. At the very least publishers provide a 'signal' to me as a customer that someone has read through the manuscript to ensure the basics of grammar and characterisation are in play. I firmly believe that a big factor in the explosion in ebook sales is due to the artificial price reduction by Amazon. It's not a simple case of books suddenly becoming digital because of the ease of using a digital book. The digital books are often cheaper, and this is part of the reason for the explosion in ebook sales. If you look at the quality of the kindle editions, the quality of the editing is almost always lower than the print editions, in some cases dishearteningly so. Cheaper ebooks have come at a cost, and one of those costs is the average fall in the copyediting of the electronic product. Many of the ebook editions appear to be direct scans of the print edition, with no further editing to remove glitches from the transferral process. It's not as simple as predatory pricing and a supermarket comparison, because Amazon is also establishing a platform and a format -- the Kindle. What they are doing are creating barriers to entry at the same time as squeezing out the competition. A proprietary format creates a switching cost for a consumer. They can no longer use their cosy App bookshelf when they switch to a competitor. The Kindle becoming the standard handheld reader creates another barrier to entry, because it is designed for use with the Amazon interface. Hence the one-click purchasing and instant wireless downloading. Once the barriers to entry become insurmountable, it becomes unfeasible for new players to enter the market. A new player has switching costs to contend with (they have to entice people away from an established product), they have to overcome Amazon's first mover advantage (for example their massive brand name heft in online ebook marketing), they have to overcome the fact that the established format and hardware are Amazon's. What all this means is that authors and publishers will only have one market for their product. Any price offered, they will have to accept. Who wants to be a full-time writer in that world? And the more time passes, the more Amazon becomes the dominant player. Why? Because people like to collect books. The larger a person's bookshelf with Amazon, the greater the switching cost. At present, you don't really own the ebooks you think you own. They're only licensed to you. For a long time I've believed removing copy protection to be opening the devil's floodgates (even back as a kid when all my friends were pirating Amiga games while I was buying them), but I think Stross has a point. I don't think it is a complete solution, though. I think Amazon have created a perception that ebooks are cheap through their aggressive pricing. Their prices undercut their competitors for the most part, copy protection or not. I suspect that the ebook price will creep up once Amazon have the barriers to entry they want, but I believe that it is on the supply side, dealing with publishers and authors, where they will be most dangerous.
Durand
Maybe its time to abstract to a new layer of ideology - an ideology that creates ideologies suitable for the messy moment.
In what way is our model broken? And why should it mutate everyone who adopts it into avaricious, social Darwinist "robber barons," as our detractors so often claim?
~Bieser
It's easy to discard some principles if the means to the end requires it and The End is big enough. I can quite imagine him thinking: "FFS, its only books"
Same can be asked of Marxists. That is, "true" Marxists.
I agree that the big publishers will either drop DRM or die. I disagree on which one they're going to do.
Well, yes, although the stakes are presumably also higher.
I guess I'm most interested in the last aspect I mentioned — the discoverability and gatekeeping function — because there are a number of ways reputation systems can go wrong and no obvious simple ways to do them right. Even the wrong but profitable ways seem to be rare, and what examples there are seem to be more historical accident than deliberate design. Maybe we're all asking the wrong question...
Obviously, this too would be very unusual in the case of someone who's getting $0.5M advances; indeed, that would seem to be the easy case.
As far as I can tell, Libertarians idealize the idea of rights excessively, but have no corresponding ideal of responsibilities. While I have run into Libertarian idealists, none of them have confronted the question of how a society which puts rights up on an altar could be gamed by those who do not have an ideal of responsibility. We're watching this happen in the US right now, (Bill of Rights without a Bill of Responsibilities) and it's quite ugly.
Maybe he's the poster boy for Amazon's company town.
On the other hand, the publishing industry is ripe for disintermediation - consider the chain of author -> agent -> publisher -> distributor -> retailer. Someone who can cut a couple pieces out of the chain, lower prices, relate intelligently to libraries, fans, and the used book market, and also put more money in an author's pocket will do very, very well indeed.
Unfortunately, I don't think Amazon has a good idea of the community of readers/writers, except as viewed through the abstract lens of statistics and used to sell more books right now rather than develop a long term plan which will encourage writing, reading and purchasing of books over the long run.
Thanks for the primer..Now I understand the process of checking out an ebook from my local public library. I find it strange that when ever the book due date is near, instead of getting email reminders from the library, I get them from Amazon. When the book is due, I get a soliciting email from Amazon asking me to purchase the book I checked out of the library and just finished reading! The process for renewing is kinda hokey. I have to wait until the book is due instead of renewing it a couple of days before it's due; but it still saves all my notes and bookmarks.
In the end it may be simply the author and retailer that survive.
Unfortunately some of those chunks of chain are actual sub-assemblies; a manuscript (what an author produces) is not a book (manuscript with editorial input and layout). An agent is optional ... if the author is able to do the agent's job, i.e. handle contract negotiations with publishers. (I would really advise would-be authors against doing this, however, unless they have a background in contract law and publishing. They'll come off worse.) The publisher -> distributor -> retailer chain can be collapsed only if the publisher is geared up for direct retail sales. And so on.
"If you want it, you pay the price?"
The only hardbacks I buy are engineering or other reference works, and since I've found quotes in later works often seriously misrepresent information in earlier works, I buy a lot of out of print or antique books. Once anyone slaps the word "collectible" on something, the price jumps substantially.
Paper and ink is such a minor expense. You would think otherwise, but no. For a 2-color hardback, a college chemistry textbook (so closer to 8x11), the PP&B ( just the price to physically print a book) was $3.65 (granted, this was a decade ago). So for a one-color Mass Market, I'd be astonished if it were more than 50 cents. the big costs are the cost of a company to pay its people, including the author, editor, IT guys, accountants, HR, etc.
The true price savings are from getting rid of the middleman(the bookstores), from a thinner distribution network (including sales people convincing bookstores to carry it), from the lack of resales, and from economies of scale because of higher sales. Which is why the iTextbooks were going to sell for $15, and that's WITH apple's 30% cut.
@88:
--
[waves hand] Over heeere!
I do get all that. Obviously the agent is necessary as long as the publisher sets out to write a contract full of snares for the unwary. However, a publisher who wrote a truly fair contract could successfully disintermediate the agent. In the real world it probably won't happen (Sigh. Greed is Good. Sigh.) but the potential does exist.
Whether anyone can successfully play the "full disintermediation" card is another matter entirely. I suspect that anyone who tried it would immediately become The New Enemy.
Thanks, BTW, for hosting a truly informative and interesting discussion.
In this day and age content is king and publishers that do not adapt will soon be done. I think Amazon is a juggernaut but it is not the all powerful entity that you make it out to be. The internet and digital distribution means that content creators no longer need "middlemen" including Amazon. Authors that produce work that people want to consume will always have several options to distribute that work. Louis CK did it with video and producing the written word is a lot easier and less expensive. An author producing great work that people want to read can do just as well without Amazon and without DRM for that matter.
Fascinating stuff: a lot of these thoughts have a genesis in Charlie's writings about the book market from a couple of years ago, but I personally wasn't smart enough to pull the threads together until reading them all in one place here. It leaves me with a couple of questions:
What stops Amazon getting into print-on-demand? I am assuming that paper books will not entirely go away, and even if they do they will still take a few years to get that far; why wouldn't Amazon become their own printer? Possibly this ties back to the point that the physical cost of printing a book is not the large chunk of the cost of a book that everyone naively thinks it is, but it strikes me that printing one book costing X and printing 5000 books costing much less than 5000X is partially because of the economics of big runs but also partially because no-one's invested a shedload of money in trying to fix that. If Amazon can throw money at the problem to fix that and build a "book printer" which can print one book at roughly the same cost as a large print run at a printer, then they could open up physical shops which are the size of a cash register and allow you to walk in and buy any book imaginable and walk out with it, just like Waterstones but with no shelves needed. (Again, I assume that the concept of "walking into a shop" either isn't entirely going away or isn't going away for a few years at least.)
Watching how the DRM story has played out here and in music suggests the following unpalatable fact: the way to get a DRM-free market in some digital good is to (a) allow DRM to one specific vendor so they have an incentive to invest tons of money in creating the market for that good (Apple with iPod music, Amazon with Kindle books), (b) wait for that vendor to invest money in the hope of getting a monopoly, (c) wait for that now-monopoly vendor to inevitably use that monopoly power to screw everyone else, (d) wait for the everyone-else to feel very sad and angry about it, (e) point out that the only way to break that monopoly is by shifting to a no-DRM world. It worked with music, it's working with books; this suggests that the current state of video being dominated by Netflix is not necessarily a bad thing, assuming that it's midway through step (b) above.
Amazon does do print on demand - Amazon Create
Only author and retailer might work in a monolingual unified worldwide market. But in the varied world that exists intermediates that understand local rules and markets will still be important.
...and your point is? It's all "product" to the publishers, and the content between the covers is almost irrelevant. The important part is the cover art and blurbs that persuade you to buy the book; once the cash register rings, game over. If you liked it, you might buy another book by the same author, but that's nothing compared to the initial sale.
As for stuff to put between the covers, there are plenty of people out there who would be delighted to be a "real published author" for $100 and a box of author copies.
[cynicism mode only slightly turned up from default]
Interesting article by an eBook publisher on CNN
The part I found interesting is the comment that authors are hiring their own people to do the functions that publishers offer. Clearly there are coordination issues, but it would be interesting to work out the economics and determine exactly what value publishers offer as an integrated business. I'm guessing the hard part is sales and marketing, but maybe not.
Doublegood quackspeak, comrade.
(If you'd managed to cram any more cliches into that comment, it would have crystallized out as a perfect platonic solid of dotcommie propaganda.)
why wouldn't Amazon become their own printer?
They already have.
(Which means they're in competition with their suppliers, which is never good.)
But Amazon are going to go into bricks'n'mortar high street retail around the time hell freezes over.
Heh, hell isn't likely to freeze over soon. Point taken. :)
Thanks, Dirk (and Charlie later); I didn't know about Amazon Create.
It's all "product" to the publishers ... once the cash register rings, game over. If you liked it, you might buy another book by the same author, but that's nothing compared to the initial sale.
Wrong. Utterly wrong. Wrong with bells on it!
Publishers are -- or were until very recently -- in the business of buying authors, not books. That's why if you're a first-timer and you offer them a novel they like, they will counter-offer with a two or three book contract (even if the latter books are as-yet untitled and unwritten). New authors seldom earn out in their first couple of books; the real profits begin to show up some time down the line.
You want an example? Try Terry Pratchett. PTerry was midlist for about the first three books, which came out at 3 year intervals and sold very modestly. Even after "The Colour of Magic" his sales only built slowly but steadily; he was 6-10 books in before his career went A-list and then bestseller.
That's what they all dream about, of course. Get the next PTerry or JKR on the ground floor with a modest advance and a multi-book contract and the profit is enough to float a publishing house for a decade.
There's one aspect you haven't covered. I never bought many hardcover books, most of the books I read came from the local library. My Kindle currently has over 150 bucks so the authors get a benefit that they wouldn't have had if it hadn't been for the Kindle.
Amazon will never have a monopoly. If they do not provide customers with the goods and services they want, the customers will go elsewhere.
DRM is a non issue. Those that care can break it and most don't care. Most people are not obsessed with "ownership." they read a book once and move on. The price of technology will only get cheaper over time. Kindle owners can buy a different ereader. The purchase of a kindle does not beholden a customer for life to Amazon.
It isn't that Amazon is doing such a great jab as it is the other publishers are doing so poorly. When they lose the idea authors are chattels and readers are petty thieves to be controlled and taken for granted they can compete. I expect them to commit mass suicide because the ideas are too big a leap for them to abide.
"Those that care can break it and most don't care"
Not quite true. Those who care most are likely to be using GNU/Linux or a similar OS. Breaking the two most common DRM schemes (Amazon's one, and the Adobe one used by most smaller ebook retailers) requires extracting a key from the Kindle or Adobe software, which requires having a running copy of that software, which isn't available for GNU/Linux (or BSD, OpenSolaris, BeOS or whatever). (And no, they don't work well enough in WINE to do the DRM-removal).
"The price of technology will only get cheaper over time" Between the increasing scarcity of the rare earth metals needed for a lot of current technology, the increasing cost of oil to produce plastics, and the increasing cost of transporting that technology from the plants where it's manufactured to other countries, I very much doubt that that's the case in the medium term.
"... How much education people have helps determine how much — and how — they read, the poll shows. More than 7 in 10 college-educated respondents said they read 'a lot,' while only half of those with no college said they did. Those who went to college are also more likely to use an e-reader."
"Owners of e-readers are more likely to read books, read more books and spend more hours each week reading. About 4 in 10 said they devoured four or more books a month...."
["Even e-reader owners still like printed books, survey finds The pleasure of reading endures in the digital age, a USC Dornsife/L.A. Times poll shows. Six in 10 people say they like to read 'a lot,' and young adults read about as much as many of their elders.", By Mike Anton, Los Angeles Times, April 14, 2012, 8:30 p.m.]
"... Until some new magic is added to MRI machines, full archives, with their many revised drafts, are as close as we get to seeing the mind in action, the actual creation of a work of writing that readers hold dear...." ["T.C. Boyle archives go to Ransom Center at UT Austin The university is also home to material from Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo and more.", By Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2012].
First, you can do a lot of that with library online catalogs. But a library's cataloging mission isn't the same as a retailer's.
Second, for e-books etc. in libraries, and why the searching of them is such an impossibility, go here, which runs it down -- it's because of another monoply.
And then there is the pulling of e-book titles from library purchase by the Biggies, as part of their febrile attempt to push-back against Kindle and Apple.
These things are all inter-connected.
Libraries do miracles with less and less, but they are up against the final walls.
In poor communities the libraries are rapidly disappearing. In other communities, they are being sold to private contractors who don't even hire librarians, or else hire them part time by hourly wage.
Bingo! I saw that in action a couple of years ago in the POD t-shirts market. A company, CafePress, built-up a huge stable of design providers and an even larger online marketplace. The model was this: The designer created artwork and put it on select merchandise (clocks, mugs, stickers, t-shirts, hoodies, underwear, tiles, boxes, cups, thermos-ware, etc). CafePress offered these items to the "shopkeepers" at a set cost and the shopkeeper selected their OWN retail price which CafePress then listed and sold on their CafePress MarketPlace. The shopkeeper kept the difference between the "retail" and the CafePress "cost" of the items sold. (as an example there were t-shirts that said "This is a $100 t-shirt" and were listed at that price in the CafePress Marketplace--and the t-shirt cost to the shopkeeper was $12.00).
And then the owner of CafePress decided HE wanted to hike his profits: CafePress changed the system to a flat 10% of retail, where CafePress set the retail price. I saw my income drop from hundreds of dollars a month to tens, others saw their income drop from $10,000 a month to $1,000, and many people even lost their homes.
The problem for the shopkeepers was two-fold: they lost control of the price and they lost control of the profit. Can you imagine going up to Disney and telling them "Hey, I think your Donald T-shirt is worth only $19.99 so that's what I'm going to market it at, and I'll give you just 10%." And artists should decide what his/her art is worth and let the market decide if that price is fair, not some hack how wants every t-shirt to be the same price.
What's to prevent Amazon from doing the same thing to ebook author/publishers after they wipe out the big companies, the only ones who can fight Amazon?
There's one more perspective: authors. I just wrote a Kindle Single (Gutenberg the Geek) and decided to play by Amazon's rules to understand them better. I signed a six-month exclusive (but after that I can and will just put it up); in return, I got impressive promotion (I heard from many people who were on the other end of that promotion). Amazon gave me the option to turn off DRM, which I did (though I don't know in practical terms what that means to a reader). Amazon lets me give away the Single for free for a half-dozen days, which I'll experiment with next.
But most important: Amazon gives me 70% of the price and lets me set that price. That is what cuts out the publisher. Yes, I give up value from the publisher -- mostly my good editor. But I have not found my publishers' marketing and distribution to be impressive -- less so with the death of Borders.
So Amazon is sucking up to the next constituency: us. Alternatives?
"Before the rounds of publisher fusions and buyouts by huge media companies the North American publishers were run by people who knew all about readers and reading."
I dunno. That was the lament when I got out of bookselling nineteen years ago. Seems to me that horse well and truly left the barn a long time ago.
I wonder if Google will kill Amazon? (Like Daleks and Cybermen duking it out.)
If Google were to add a shopping cart and payment processing front-end to Google Shopping or Google Books (with opt-in and technical requirements for vendors) then there would be no need for middle men.
The real roadblock wrt. ebooks in libraries is that the USA does not have a Public Lending Right framework. Nor, given the way libraries are [locally] funded is it likely to get one, which means publishers will continue to see libraries as cannibalizing direct sales for the forseeable future.
Right you are Charlie. Which is why, on top of the whole DRM issue for ebooks, libraries in the US are forced to deal with cartels offering shitty deals for ebook packages (this has been the sticking pint between Elsevier and university libraries for years-- forced to buy 1000 ebooks noone wants to get the 2 they do). There are a handfull of research providers who are selling (not leasing) unrestricted ebook packages, but they are tiny and only in a few research fields. Something similar would work for fiction but would require publishers to play along. Which yeah, not too likely.
...forced to buy 1000 ebooks noone wants to get the 2 they do)...
That is forced "bundling", which I though was illegal in retail. If so, why doesn't that apply to libraries?
I always understood that university libraries "could" unbundle, it was just that the package offered for the bundle was just too attractive.
It just struck me that if you presented publishers as "venture capitalists investing in writer startups" you might get through to a larger percentage of the dotcommie crowd... ;)
Let me add to Charlie's "Rubbish." I self-published a short story in December. Since then, I sold fewer than 30 copies at $0.99 each. I've got seven more stories and novels in the pipeline, and I'm having fun and not complaining -- but I don't see $100,000 per year in my future, let alone a $100,000 differential between the vast sums I could make through traditional publishing and the EVEN VASTER amounts I could make by self-publishing.
My goals are far more modest: If I can make $10,000 through creative writing in 2015 I shall consider the enterprise successful.
Not that I don't dream of Rowlingbucks.
Stunning revelations for me:
"Many of the ebook editions appear to be direct scans of the print edition, with no further editing to remove glitches from the transferal process."
Yet that does not stop sales:
"Because people like to collect books. "
People like to collect eBooks? Any genres?
I would have thought of eBooks as the kinds of flimsy things that attract people for whom books are disposables, not collectible.
Even more surprising,people still like to collect eBooks despite the glitches from the transferal process?
???
"- not only can they not (legally) read their Amazon books on another device, they can't read DRM'd ebooks from other suppliers on their Kindle."
People keep saying this. It isn't true. i read my kindle stuff of on my Ipad and Iphone all the time.
It is true that specilaized eReaders block competing content, but they will be dead soon
Jeff, other than the promotion, those are the standard terms for self-publishing on Amazon. You need a three-month exclusive contract to have the free days (which don't help with promotion very much, incidentally, because everyone who has written a three-page 'book' called Mi Grate Buk (For Fans Of J.K. Rawling) has taken advantage of that, so mow readers associate 'free' with 'unutterably bad'), but the 70% royalties (for books priced between $2.99 and $9.99) and option to remove DRM are standard and don't require any exclusivity at all.
Thank you for writing the first article about this that I've seen that isn't about how Amazon is bad because it's ruining our literary culture, or some other grand, melodramatic statement. It's not a situation where one is the hero and the other is evil; both parties have created issues.
What's to prevent Amazon from doing the same thing to ebook author/publishers after they wipe out the big companies, the only ones who can fight Amazon?
Nothing. Which is why the big six went for the agency model like passengers on a sinking liner fighting over the life belts. The agency model basically gives them back control over the retail price, and hence the profitability of the product. Which in turn stops Big Disintermediating Retailers from low-balling them into oblivion.
One emerging trend that has the potential to stave off the need for a non-DRM solution is the emergence of app-based consumption of ebooks. If people read most (if not all) of their books on an iPad, they can easily switch between the major ebook providers. This means that they don't have to leave their library behind if they adopt a new provider, lowering or eliminating the switching costs completely. Most reading still happens on closed readers, but the emergence of tablets as a primary reading device is a notable development.
There is a Plan C that you haven't contemplated. Rather than allow Amazon to control the DRM, the publishers could get together and embrace a common DRM standard that would be supported across e-reader platforms. That technically makes it easier for consumers to move content between machines without tying them specifically to Amazon, or the Kindle device, specifically. But I would agree that eliminating DRM entirely would be a far more disruptive factor to Amazon's business.
Speaking only for myself and from limited experience, I can say that a basic eBook cover can be ginned up in about four hours. Dean Wesley Smith uses Powerpoint, I use an antiquated Photoshop, and we both come up with the same "covers are fast" for eBooks answer. If you can do this yourself, I'd say go for it.
Typesetting is irrelevant in an eBook (sadly, Kindle loves to screw up formatting no matter what you do), and for POD it's pretty easy in Word. Places like Lulu send you a format file that you can bend your work to. It takes a few hours to properly format your manuscript. Actually, printing it out in manuscript format for an old-line publisher takes much longer than formatting it for POD, due to printer speeds for manuscripts that are hundreds of pages long.
Marketing is hard, but the big imponderable is editing. Not copy editing (which is mechanical--I've got one error per book using only myself and friends, which isn't bad, considering that none of us are English majors), but real editing to improve the quality of the text.
The problem with editing isn't that editors don't add value, it's trying to figure out how much value they add. For someone who is self-publishing, figuring out whether a manuscript would benefit from several thousand dollars of editing is hard to do. Primarily, it comes down to figuring out whether editing will improve sales enough to offset the cost of the edit, and that's a bit of a crap-shoot. This isn't to insult editors, it's just that every book is a bit of a black swan, and that makes such decisions hard.
I'm sure that Mitt Romney has had some of his 'People' read these 'Books ' things of which you speak. These people would then have supplied The Grate Leader with a report on these 'Books ' that would be delivered by the Man Himself on Fox Moos to an electorate who don't actually 'read ' these 'books 'or 'Books' of any kind other than the Bible, but who do understand that 'Reading Books ' might be a GOOD thing for said Leaders to have done ...provided that they were the RIGHT sort of Books of course and that they didn't divert attention from the Truths exposed in The GOOD Book..... oh, and also in " No Apology: The Case for American Greatness " by Mitt Romney.
Romney might only read one or two books a year, but he reads them several times and I don't doubt he can quote from them Chapter and Verse as the Occasion demands... and his partisans would consider that to be a Good Thing.
As for Gates and Jobs ? They have " People " too and of Course they read the Right kind of Books at the Right kind of time and will mention them at the appropriate time and place, with copies left in just the right places that they might be discovered so as to establish verisimilitude in the Role that they are playing at any given time .. these people are actors on a World stage and everything they do is Scripted and Performed as Theatre.The performance even continues after their deaths. Death as Theatre ..as in famous last words?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/31/steve-jobs-last-words
Jobs was an artist with a natural flair for beauty of design and it wouldn't surprise me if he'd rehearsed those famous last words...very enigmatic .. "what did he mean by that?"
I think many posters on this thread are underestimating how much less tech-savvy (or more time poor or whatever, just think normal people) people will put up with Amazon and the way they do business. Thus they imagine that competitors will appear and ensure that Amazon will maintain certain standards or not make too big a profit.
Which may be correct in the long run, but {quote Keynes}.
The barriers to entry are larger than people think, not only do you have to build a decent website and supply contacts, you also have to make sure that enough people know of it and get to see how wonderful it is. QUite a lot of people are pissed off at Ebay for various reasons, but it seems to be taking an age to die and has still been profitable for years, or so I read.
The only way to stop Amazon from gutting the publishing industry is to boycott Amazon. I don't own a Kindle and have stopped buying from the Amazon store. (If I can't find elsewhere, so be it.) If four or five million people did the same thing, maybe Bezos would look into his soul and reconsider his slash-and-burn approach to books and the book industry. Oh, I forgot: he sold that a long time ago.
If four or five million people did the same thing, maybe Bezos would look into his soul and reconsider his slash-and-burn approach
You guys crack me up!
(Hint: Amazon's annual revenue in 2011 was 48 billion dollars. So unless the "four or five million people" you're talking about are each currently spending >$1000 per year with Amazon, the net effect on their bottom line will be lost in the line noise.)
Oh, a strawman - and one that actually answers the question you claim to be interested in.
No-one claims that in a libertarian society "everyone" would automatically act as a robber baron. The problem is that libertarians claim that under your system, there would magically be no robber barons - the ones who currently exist, and are held in marginal check by government regulations you scorn, would suddenly disappear.
As Charlie said, it's a system that would work well for perfectly spherical frictionless human beings. But it stops working the moment that the aggressive guy with a shotgun decides he wants his unarmed neighbour's cow. In the real world, it doesn't happen because the government would investigate the killing and arrest him, so he doesn't gain anything. In libertarian-world, it apparently doesn't happen because, um, magic.
If you can explain why it is that no-one in libertarian world would ever want to infringe on someone else's rights, then you might get taken more seriously. But since I've never seen any attempt to answer that question with anything other than magical thinking (the funniest version of which is the "insurance" answer), there's no current reason to do so.
The problem specialized ereaders have is that Amazon did not allow other manufactures to simultaneously decode DRM protected Amazon and DRM protected epub files. Since most of these manufactures had their own content stores (or contracts with non-amazon stores) they all chose to remove compatibility with Amazon.
This all happened a couple of years ago and was probably an early move to keep their consumers as close as possible, and trying to stop them from getting used to access to multiple stores.
Actually, if you read what comes up on a search for references to publishing on Hacker News (a prominent dotcommie hangout, as focused on business as technical issues despite the name), you'll see that a lot of them already do view publishers as VCs for books --- who offer terrible financial terms and bring little else to the table. (It's an article of faith that they outsource pretty much everything they can, including editorial and design work, and do very little marketing.)
So, if for some reason, you want to argue against them, this is what you're arguing against.
See this thread, for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2049028
breaking DRM isn't all that hard to do. I'm totally non-technical, and I do it all the time. You don't have to be a techy, you just have to know where to look for the tools.
You can find me on HN as cstross. I am familiar with their doctrinaire mindset. Let's put it this way: there's some merit to it, but a lot of drawbacks most of the natives appear blind to. Goes with the territory, I guess.
That is forced "bundling", which I though was illegal in retail. If so, why doesn't that apply to libraries?
Libraries aren't considered retail, for a lot of arcane reasons having mostly to do with taxes. And the bundling is being done by research cartels with near or actual monopolies on the content, like Elsevier. This is where it gets into a grey area, legally and morally, because Elsevier and other academic publishers aren't retail and so don't have to abide by retail rules. This is why they won't bat an eye charging libraries $10,000 a year for access to a database. Because they can. And since they paid for the peer-review process, and have leveraged sole distribution rites from the researchers and authors of the content, they have created a virtual monopoly on all the latest research being in done in several fields (most notably in the Healthcare industry).
Elsevier has attracted the most ire of late, because they've been doing overtly nasty and dickish things, like packaging advertisements for new drugs as journals and selling these fake journals to research libraries and universities, or rewriting access agreements to their proprietary database every year as an excuse to jack up prices and swap content. Licenscing ejournals and databases has become such a Byzantine process that sometimes it's impossible to tell if your library "owns" a specific journal title, because the rites may be orphaned or in limbo. I once described ejournals as Schrodinger's resources, because you never know if they exist or not and checking to see if they do may trigger their demise.
I always understood that university libraries "could" unbundle, it was just that the package offered for the bundle was just too attractive.
Nope. Most EULAs forbid breaking bundles on pain of massive lawsuit. There are very few Academic publishers who sell a la carte subscriptions to databases/eBooks/eJournals. The few who do are tiny and have next to no content to offer.
If a fiction model were devised for libraries, it would most likely follow the cartel bundling model: pay X amount of $ a year, get all the ebook versions of the bestsellers from Publishing House Y. Add a few extra 000s to that subscription price and they'll throw in their back catalog of midlist authors. It wouldn't be optimal but it would be attractive form the budget management perspective of a strap cashed library director and the CEO of Publishing House Y, who has just found a market willing to pay them thousands of dollars a year for a product that requires no additional overhead (they were already going to convert those ebooks anyway and sell them one at a time).
Well, maybe.
But maybe it's the other way around. Maybe the best way to re-direct Amazon from its current path in publishing is to actually buy more stuff from it, but other stuff than books.
And maybe the current market forces are already doing this.
Out of the 48 billion in Amazon revenue last year 28 billion was from electronics and other non-book, non-media purchases. This was a 56% growth from the previous year.
So, out of that 48 billion there was 17 billion coming from books, movies, music and other media.(and thus even less for books) and the growth rate was smaller than for "electronics and non-book".
kill amazon? easy. sell coffee at libraries.
Okay, so several people in this thread are anticipating that amazon will rewrite the terms they currently offer to authors publishing via amazon to be much worse once the publishers are dead. Doing this would require amazon managment to get a lobotomy first - 30% for hosting a glorifed text file server is already monopolist pricing, and going further runs too high a risk of killing the goose that lays golden eggs. That is not amazons long term plan.
Their long term plan is to get all authors to take this deal, where you hand them a finished manuscript and they uncritically put it on their server, and the public uses amazons recommendation algoritms for slushpile sorting.
This plan allows amazon to collect 28% of all expediture on literature as pure rent for all eternity. You expect them to risk that ocean of cash for short term greed? Well, buisnesses have done dumber things, so I will not claim that it is impossible, but I think it a very low probability outcome.
What about advances and editing? These are valid concerns for authors. but Amazon has absolutely no need to care - It does not matter - to amazon - if author X writes slower because he or she has to work as a nightwatchman, when authors z, y and q, who are respectively on the dole, independantly wealthy, and insomniac are also handing them manuscripts.
Vernor Vinge was a professor while he wrote most of his work. Rowling was famously on welfare until Potter exploded. Many, many people just flat out like to write fiction, and will do so entirely on spec.
Editing? Well, I anticipate that some skilled editors will eventually work out a contract where they are paid a percentage of a books earnings, but again, amazon has absolutely no incentive to get into this part of the buisness - as doing so would require them to spend money in a way running servers do not.
zornhau: Google has been trying to horn in on Amazon's various digital content sales markets for years now. What they have to show for it is the single worst effort/reward ratio fo any of the major players: they've burned an astonishing amount of money, all in order to stake out single-digit marketshare (or worse) in sales of digital books, music and movies. (And for that matter social networking.) As a former employee, I see no sign that this is ever going to change: the kind of smart that google makes a point of hiring is not the kind of smart that is going to buy them success in these fields.
Much like Microsoft, they'll never be a non-player, because they have infinite amounts of money to shovel at the project and can run their content sales operations at a loss without having the slightest impact on their bottom line. But they're never going to be a serious factor in these markets.
Doing this would require amazon managment to get a lobotomy first - 30% for hosting a glorifed text file server is already monopolist pricing, and going further runs too high a risk of killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
Ahem: current terms they impose on publishers are between 50% and 70%. Yes, for hosting a glorified text file server! The deal they give authors who cut out the publishers and go direct-and-exclusively through Amazon is way sweeter than anything they give anyone else.
So I ask you: if they kill the major publishers, why would Amazon offer indie authors better terms than they offer the surviving [small] publishers? After all, collecting 70% rent on all literature for eternity has got to be better than collecting 30%, right?
Nevertheless, individual acts of resistance matter, because if everyone waits for society as a whole to act nothing will get done. I can't think of any movement for social change that skipped over "small-scale actions that the target could ignore" to "complete victory." They are necessary, just not sufficient.
Because the suppliers they are dealing with in the latter case are individual authors, not professional negotiators for a corporation - This is important, because that means they are regular people, rather than homo economicus. Squeeze to hard, and the following very predictable chain of events will take place
1: Someone else will start a glorified file server. Note that the barrier to entry in the buisness model they have is nigh-zero.
2: Lots of authors will use it instead, even if it intially pays less in absolute terms, because it does not violate their sense of fairness.
3: Oops, amazon just lost its position as default merchant. CEO that instituted the hike in the cut is murdered by angry shareholders.
Your theory would hold more water if such alternative ebook publishing platforms didn't already exist. Ahem.
It is not so much a theory as it is about strategy, repeat buisness and stable equilibriums. Amazon squeezes publishers hard because they can. Publishers are profit maximisers, and will take 30% of 40000 sales over 70 % of 10000.
Individuals are much more likely to respond to such an offer with "Go take a long walk off a short pier". Which is why they dont, currently, offer those terms to individuals. And would be foolish indeed to do so in the future.
Ah but they only have to get it right once...
Or perhaps it won't be them. Suppose PayPal created an aggregating site enabling you to search people's PayPal sites.
Given the number of resellers, Amazon is already on its way to becoming a glorified search engine and payment processor. Other people can also do that.
It has little to do with the content providers, you have to convince the customers to come with you.
And those want a smooth experience, a store they feel they can trust, a recommendation algorithm that definitely does take more than nigh-zero to start. Oh, and competitive prices for the large part of the customer base that only cares about getting a good deal themselves.
And all of this at a level that is similar to that of your big competitor.
Which is a problem after you let one company rule the consumer connection for as long as the remaining publishers or authors will have at the point that company can start increasing their part of the pie.
zornhau: See my earlier comment. "Getting it right" does not mean achieving rough feature parity with amazon: they've already done that. Getting it right means leapfrogging Amazon in terms of both features and user experience (users in this case being both authors and readers and to some unknown extent the publishers too) to the point where it's worth everyone's trouble to switch. I'm not saying that it's impossible that Google will do this, but if you're betting that they actually will? I'll take the other side of that wager at any odds you want to offer.
Apple hasn't been able to do this in the ebook sphere, and this is territory that is far less alien to them than it is to Google.
(And Paypal? Not in a million, billion years.)
This sounds like a bunch of buggy whip makers. If it was about cars you would be cheering. I'm a Ned Lud on book readers. But things change. Like or not.
Amazon may be becoming a trust. Nobody has used anti-trust laws for a long time.
Interestingly, Richard Sears (Sears, Roebuck & Co.) used a similar model when they started their catalog business in the late 19th century. The simply printed the catalog with items that they did not order from manufacturers until the got firm orders.
Publishers are profit maximisers, and will take 30% of 40000 sales over 70 % of 10000.
You mean "should." They should take smaller slice of the bigger pie.
When there's a large number of companies and so multiple tactics, they will tend to converge on an optimal solution - most of the time, and into the neighborhood of an optimum. Real economics are complex.
When there's only one actor involved, how can they know? If everyone is buying from the monopolists already, there's no information about how profitable alternative business models might be and good reason not to go exploring.
al_zorra wrote:
I do a lot of consulting. I also watch Undercover Boss, which has featured several places I patronize as a customer.
There are intrinsic disconnects between management clue, how employees are treated, how the company behaves to customers (abusive or constructive), how the company behaves to vendors or suppliers. If you make a 4-D map of that, you have companies with no clue and excellent coverage in the other areas, companies which are abusive to employees but excel in other areas, places which treat employees great but which I would never patronize as a customer, etc.
Waving a flag and pointing out that Amazon's workplace conditions are only legal minimum OK in the US (and not the arguably better performing and ethically "living wage" and constructive employee relations) is very different from any of the other arguments about Amazon's customers or vendor relationships.
It's arguable that Amazon would not exist today if from the beginning they had upped their cost equation 10% to be nicer to employees. The stock market and capital sources watched Amazon expand and catch market share and discover new market, losing money nearly the whole time, but Bezos could make a credible case that they were always right around the corner from profit if they chose to slow expansion. And they were right.
This thread's done a lot to show the negatives that came with that. But that's due to Amazon's inherent disruptiveness of the prior market model, and lack of settled future model (who intermediates for whom, who aggregates for whom, how many layers are there). Nobody knows the answers. We know that they're not the same ones. But I enjoy living in a world where Amazon exists and I can just order a lot of its stuff online. Previously, despite living for years in or near cities with some of the best bookstores in the world, there were things I just couldn't get. I could go to the UC Berkeley library, sure, but to own a copy at home? Go fish. Get a book for my computer? Sure, if it was out of copyright, and if Project Gutenberg had scanned it.
The old publisher system met the Internet and the new distribution models and went splat. Amazon was a large part of the splat, and is picking up pieces in a manner that is good for them. Apple's doing the same thing. It's not clear if the Publishers are yet. The Authors are largely on the sidelines alternating between concerned, befuddled, and excited.
Do I wish Amazon was nicer to its warehouse guys? Sure. Do I expect to see Bezos on Undercover Boss doing that stuff in person? No. Will I stop buying from them (at least for some stuff)? No. What's the future look like? You tell us. Not like the present, nor the past.
I've never actually read Amazon's terms and conditions for eBooks. I had an Amazon account before eBooks existed at Amazon. I've also never had to agree to any terms and conditions before buying free eBooks from Amazon. Personally, I won't give Amazon any of my money for eBooks. I find Amazon's Kindle business repulsive. Bezos is a megalomaniac.
Anyway, since I've never read or agreed to Amazon's eBook terms and conditions, I don't think if I convert the free eBooks I've gotten from Amazon to be wrong.
I find Amazon's Kindle business repulsive.
Why is Amazon any more repulsive than B&N, who tie their book DRM to your credit card number?
"Paid for the peer review process." Well, not quite -- at least not in physics and astronomy. In my experience, the effort of the peers doing the reviewing is effectively donated by the institutions that employ them -- the same institutions that are paying for the subscriptions and (to some extent with grants) the page charges. The (smaller, specialist) journals each employ a handful of academic editors (working part time out of their institutional offices -- I think they get paid, but I couldn't swear to it) and a few actual office staff to wrangle the process, and maintain a website.
haha! They sell coffee at Barnes and Noble, but they are still dying.
I meant that libraries could buy an unbundled product. I've read elsewhere that Elsevier claim that this is always an option, whenever the bundling issue is raised, so they are not "forcing" libraries to buy a bundle, just that bundles are much more attractive to libraries.
Of course Elsevier are fighting open science initiatives which would undermine their business model. About time their model was challenged.
Amusingly enough, Amazon has ALREADY sown the seeds of destroying its' monopoly. How, you say ? Via their "Cloud Reader". It's cumbersome now, but I'm quite sure someone will automate it fully soon.
How ?
Requirements: Amazon Account, Kindle App for your platform, Calibre E-book manager ( http://calibre-ebook.com/ )
Get the book from Amazon, have it delivered to your "cloud reader".
Then download it to your Kindle App.
From there, import it to Calibre.
Once imported, convert to Epub.
Voila! DRM Free! Ready to read on your non-proprietary reader of choice. (I have a Nook Color and a Kobo. . .)
And since this IS the Internet. . . . PROFIT !! (grin)
This is not as black and white as you make it out to be. No one needs a publisher any longer, and pretty soon they won't need a retailer. HTML 5 makes it possible for any creative person to go direct to consumers without any intermediary. A lot of people are going to do that. In categories like movies, the economics of direct selling of catalog product is so obvious it is hard to imagine any film company missing it.
While the original poster may need some advice on his tone, the idea that traditionally published authors don't do any marketing and sales work is just wrong. They spend HUGE amounts of time on promotions, tours, signings, social media, etc., etc. Your "division of labor"doesn't exist in any writing job that I know of in this day and age, and any cautious, moderate professional involved in writing and publishing at this point will be careful not to draw conclusions regarding self-publishing yet. The jury is still out, and the change is still underway. The industry of writing and publishing books won't remain the same regardless of how many lawsuits are filed or corporations are reviled (rhyme unintended).
@srpaulsen - I'm sure the original poster and Charlie Stross are grateful to your insight into how the real-world writing and publishing business work.
I can go direct to the public right now, sort of... I assume you have seen my extract from TechnoMage and the purchase button on my site? All I need now, for the 1 in 1000 who might be interested in buying it, is a few million people a month dropping in to view.
Forced bundling doesn't apply to cable networks either.
I take it that everyone is fine with paying high prices for their ebooks if they believe that Amazon is the devil and the publishers are poor victims? Prior to the agency model some level of price competition existed that had nothing to do with Amazon. The agency model destroyed it by "setting prices". Yes the industry is in transition and yes there will be winners and losers. At the moment authors might actually have an opportunity of winning if they will only chose to invest in some copy editing.
Amazon and ebook format gives any aspiring author a way to sell their material at a much higher rate than they will ever receive from a publisher. Right now most of it's drivel but there's always hope. As with everything nothing is ever black and white.
And so -- I, as a reader, creator, and all around citizen am expected to sit back and go, O myes, here they are doing what is to be expected of monopoly congloms, devasting both labor and consumers at the expense of labor and consumer, and not complain or make any moves to change these conditions?
I have always refused to buy from amazon from the very beginning -- and have been called a luddite.
I call myself a boycotter of amazon, apple and all those others, who is looking into every way to avoid them all, while still getting royalties as creator.
Nothing's yet in place, all is up for grabs, so I read more and more into the history in the U.S. of the plutocratic monopolist wars of the late 19th century and the 3.5 decades of the 20th century -- and then how in the 7th and 8th decades of the 20th century, all those standards and regulations started to be dismantled.
Nothing happens in a vacuum and without context -- to protect oneself one needs information -- which I'm seeing every day becoming less accessible by these conglomerates.
I'm afraid I haven't had time to even read the latest.
Question: Given the impending demise of DRM, what would you buy NOW? Despite my wife's experience with Microsoft abruptly going out of the DRM'd music business (and losing her entire classic music library), she has bought a kindle and now proposes to buy me one for my birthday so we can at least read together what she has purchased (ie rented from Amazon).
When I check Amazon US, they offer me besides a Kindle, a used Galaxy Tab and a used HP tablet with android installed. What would you suggest?
This may be true for physics and astronomy but Elsevier dominates the health and medical journals with an iron fist.
Can't understand how DRM is a boon for Amazon, as most books have very little repeat value, once I have read hunger games, having instant access on my nook is never an issue. Also, considering that I can access same book on my PC, mac, iphone, android, windows phone, blackberry makes moving to ibooks or like very easy.
Only reason kindle ebooks are very successful, is no one else created so seamless and compelling environment.
Question: Given the impending demise of DRM, what would you buy NOW?
As an ereader?
Currently I have:
a Nook Simple Touch (6" eink, 800x600) a Nook Color (7" LCD, 1024x600) 2 Motorola Droids, no longer in use as phones (4" LCD 852x480) 1 Motorola Triumph (4.5" LCD, 800x480) 1 Samsung Galaxy Nexus (4.7" LCD, 1280x720)
If you have good eyes and a limited budget, a used Droid or equivalent screen is over 300dpi and basically perfect. It is small, however. That's a plus for portability and one-handed usability.
If your eyes aren't 20/20 and your budget is limited, look for a refurbished Nook Color or similar Android tablet. The screen is large and clear and bright, and though the letters are slightly chunky, it's an esthetic call.
If you have money and need a new smartphone anyway, the Galaxy Nexus is beautiful in all respects except battery life.
I hear Google's going to sell a 7" tablet for $200 - $300 in July. Maybe. If so, it's probably a good bet.
The page turn speed of eink annoys me.
speaking as a reader not a second hand book store owner for once my biggest complaint about ebooks is the no share issue I bought my son the Hunger Games trilogy box set on-line -he couldn't wait a week and bought the ebook so great HE can read it on his ipad but the other 4 members of the household nope bad luck
the ebook was half the price of the pb but value wise it is a single user/single use item not to mention it would have lasted 5 seconds on the shelf at the shop once we had all read it
You have an excellent point. This is a great long-term strategy.
You are totally naive. Once Amazon is the only publisher they will unilaterally change the contract terms.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
I have a Kindle and a Galaxy Tab 7"
Tab Pros: Great for PDFs. Kindle and Kobo and other aps. great web browser(s). Expandable (microSD + Dropbox etc.)
Tab cons: Hard on the eyes for long term reading. Lots of reading? Charge every night. Heavier than the Kindle.
Kindle Pros: E-ink great on the eyes forlong term reading. Kindle DRM easy to break. Only have to recharge every 1 or 2 months. Great for outdoor use. Lightweight, not a pain to hold single-handed for long periods. Inexpensive.
Kindle Cons: No night reading without external light. Can't read EPub. Not great for PDFs. Crappy web browser. Limited expansion capability. (Kindle cloud only)
The Amazon model basically is only compelling if either (a) there are bunchteen thousand physical titles to get to customers or (b) there's one master DRM key to rule them all.
Back in the day, the number of miles from your publisher to my house would have been a problem, but the number of milliseconds isn't, and an open-format ebook model would let multiple suppliers sell globally to people with whatever device. We may actually get there THANKS to Amazon's single-gateway DRM model!
We just need a credit card model that works across borders, an Internet, and not too much government insistence that I get my daily dose of Canadian Content.
Then too, my wife got a parcel from Zazzle on Friday; all we need to do is extend that model to books...
The one thing that bugs me (Living in New Zealand) is region locking. There are ebooks on amazon that they won't sell me because im in asia pacific and the publisher is too dumb/lazy to let amazon sell them in APAC.
The key point, I think, is that Elsevier does not pay the peer reviewers.
Or the authors.
This is what happens when you accidentally hand the keys to the reputation system to a private company.
Amazon is evil. Doesn't the DOJ see the irony in their case in helping Bezos. His attack on free markets, his arm twisting against taxes, his obsession with global domination is the worst possible outcome for the world. Anti-trust!
"breaking DRM isn't all that hard to do. I'm totally non-technical, and I do it all the time. You don't have to be a techy, you just have to know where to look for the tools."
No. First you have to know that DRM exists at all, and then you have to know that it can be removed. Two very large conceptual hurdles for most people, and ones that corporations work very, very hard indeed to put in place.
It is hard to break free if you are unaware of being a prisoner to begin with.
I buy books on Kindle I would never bother to buy, let alone read in either hardback or paper. If there is a book I plan on keeping or an author I like, I buy their hardback.
I do find fascinating the abject prejudice against those of us who must resort to self-publishing in order to have our books see the light of day. I write in the genera of the history of the wild west. A good 80% of the books that are produced in this field are self-published. No publisher would touch them. The bitter irony is one of my books about Wyatt Earp has already produced more of a cash flow for me than a colleague who had a major contract. Because he refuses to even consider lowering himself to considering alternative routes for publishing, he has books that will never see the light of day.
No, my things are never going to be a best-seller. I know that. Why on earth would anyone in their right mind want a 528 page non-fiction about Wyatt Earp with nearly 2000 footnotes? Only a "buff" or a researcher would want it. I know just who my market is, how many books will sell, and what I must do to present them, properly.
I write in a field where we are probably some of the worst sticklers for accuracy, and provable fact. The irony is that someone comes along, gets a big contract, uses our work without citing us, and gets all the glory. It's not right, but that's the way of the world.
The world has changed. If we don't evolve, as authors, we are going to be left standing in the dust. Let's be honest about the publishing industry. If you aren't famous, have a scandal, or a "hook" you are never going to be considered. It's ugly, but true. You can make fun of authors such as moi, but at least we are actively working and do have a specific audience for our books. We'll never get rich, but how many writers ever do?
I was once ashamed of how I was working, but I'm not any more. I am bright enough to know that only a specific person is going to read what I write and there isn't a publisher in the world who would touch it this day and age. When you put 15 years of research into a subject, you really don't want to have some nit-wit assistant editor taking out terribly important historical information because they cannot even consider the fact that the OK Corral is not the name of a movie.
You either evolve or become extinct. I find the brave new publishing world to be quite exciting. The beauty of it is there is room to be very little. Remember, the dinosaurs went extinct but those tiny mouse size mammals survived.
As for the corner bookstore, where I live, in the middle of nowhere New Mexico, we don't have one. As a researcher, I still buy hard copies of books. For my current endeavor, I've bought at least 75 books, all from Amazon, most from used sellers. I remember having to wait 6 to 8 weeks for a local bookseller to finally get in a title I need. Those days are gone forever, and I, for one, am thankful for it.
If you really want to see dirty, check out the fine print with Apple's new app for publishing via their system. I was quite excited when I first heard about it. Forget it. At least Amazon doesn't require you to sign your life over to them, and then maybe they might now want your title to see the light of day - for political reasons.
Evolve or become extinct.
SJR
Amazon's business model is embodied in its mission statement: to be the most customer-centric company on earth. That's business, not altruism, but you will find every aspect of its operation to be traceable to that idea.
Having one company with 90% of the eggs is never a good idea - I don't think Amazon is evil any more than I think Apple is evil, but both companies, and all the various publishers, have long or short-term goals of gaining market share and maximising profits.
I'd like to see other strong e-tailers rise and I'm all for publishers dropping DRM, which will help, but Amazon isn't just deep pockets and a nice device. A competitor to Amazon needs to compete on:
You are utterly dependent on Amazon. They pay your rent... because right now they give you 70% of the sales price. Now, if they achieve a monopoly position, they can invert the percentages and keep 70% for themselves and give you 30%. Boom, your income is less than half what it was.
Amazon has gone above and beyond to attract and work with self-publishers - and are making serious profits from them as a result. As Bezos noted in his last shareholders letter, "more than a thousand KDP authors now each sell more than a thousand copies a month".
No other major etailer gives self-publishers anywhere near the same opportunity. Oh, they list the books, but they don't promote them (through bestseller lists, etc) in anything like the same way. Amazon is doing a lot to lock in self-publishers and create a dependency - especially with the barbed offering of KDP Select (an exclusivity deal which is the worst thing they've come up with recently).
I don't want Amazon to gain absolute primacy because I think that would be bad for everyone. But the focus of discussion seems to be on trying to cripple Amazon rather than set up a powerful competitor. Perhaps Google Play will step up in the ebook arena?
[If publishers really want to cripple Amazon, the impact of withdrawing all their books for a couple of years would be immense - but I'm not sure the publishers would survive it either.]
Hey Charlie,
253 comments later, I think I fully understand how this breaks down. So here's my question:
If a future-oriented publishing company can disintermediate the agent (thus making you 10% more profit) and distributor, (making you whatever $$ that brings) handle the editing, copyediting, layout and cover artist in a fashion which doesn't interrupt your work flow, bring out your next novel as an e-book anywhere in the world, use high-quality POD for people who want physical books, manage the publisher's part of the relationship with fans, libraries, bookstores, etc., in a rational way, and give you a 50% royalty on the e-books, all this wrapped up in a decent contract that covers the appropriate rights, do you take the deal?
Why or why not?
If they're customer - centric, then why is it that they never test their Web interfaces on customers before putting them online?
Al Zorra writes:
I encourage you to do whatever you feel like here, it's your life, money, and content.
I am just saying, the Internet broke a bunch of preexisting business models and it's not going back. That's not "today's net is the only future". That's "the future is not the past."
Travel agencies imploded. Newspaper classifieds will never come back.
Amazon is not "good". But it is - and the world changed. As a consumer I like a lot of the change, but am acutely aware of monopoly and monosomy risks. You seem to me to be stuck in the past.
"...by 2010 Amazon had come close to an 85% market share in the ebook sector"
Yes, indeed it did. What Charlie has conveniently forgotten to mention, though, is that that figure is nowhere near true anymore. Since the Nook's and iBooks' rise in popularity, Kindle share has decreased quite a bit. Probably around the 50-55% mark now.
Still significant? Undoubtedly. But not as "monopoly-friendly" as Mr. Stross seems to imply. But hey, 85% does sound much more frightening, so there's that.
More importantly - so what if Amazon dominates the market? Who ever said that this would remain true till the End of Time? Go back 20 years and most people probably found it hard to see anyone other than B&N and Borders as dominant players, and now B&N is struggling to keep up and Borders is no more. Someone always comes along who figures out a better way to do what you're doing. Amazon will be no different.
All this brouhaha over Amazon's "monopoly" is severely exaggerated. The world is not coming to an end. Not even the world of publishing. Amazon dominates the market because they offer competitive prices and solid service. When NewOnlineRetailer comes along and offers better service and better pricing, consumers will jump ship; walled gardens aren't going to keep them in.
I haven't liked what Amazon and Apple have been doing over the past few years. Locking out competitors undermines everything the Internet is for and creates monopolies that eventualy will not help customer.
I have always refused to buy Apple products and I no longer shop at Amazon, I would rather pay a few pence more.
Alex R flies a kite: If a future-oriented publishing company can disintermediate the agent (thus making you 10% more profit) and distributor
You don't understand what an agent is for. They're probably the last intermediary that's going to be dissed, because what they do is negotiate, on commission, to get me more money from everyone else. Seriously. They cost 15% of the gross take, but an average to good agent can double the amount of money extracted from the rest of the supply chain by the author/agent team.
They also provide an intangible service that's not obvious to outsiders, but consider: as an author, I need to be on cordial working terms with my editor/publisher/the folks I do business with. There is back-and-forth involved in editing and book production processes, after all. This would tend to inhibit me from engaging in take-no-prisoners commercial haggling with these same people, whoever they are. But my agent is under no such inhibitions. So she can arm-wrestle aggressively for the best deal on my behalf, while leaving my good working relationship with my editor undamaged.
This is desirable because publishing business relationships are long-term things -- books may stay on sale for decades -- and so are author/editor relationships. We're looking at building a long term multi-book brand, not publishing one-shots. It's therefore helpful if my editor's stress levels don't rise every time he or she sees an email from me because they're wondering if I'm coming at them with a pointy stick to demand more money.
In your brave new world of fully disintermediated publishing, you neglected to examine how author brand management and supplier/publisher negotiations are handled. These are non-obvious things that are nevertheless vital to any long term media supply chain ...
"In your brave new world of fully disintermediated publishing, you neglected to examine how author brand management and supplier/publisher negotiations are handled. These are non-obvious things that are nevertheless vital to any long term media supply chain ..."
Don't think you thought that one through Charlie. In a 'fully disintermediated' world, there wouldn't be "supplier/publisher" negotiations, particularly if the entity acting as the services supplier was author owned and controlled. More like flat rate for the job.
As for author brand management - what do you think you are doing here?
I was reading through this conversation, and I kept having the nagging feeling that people were missing something obvious. Yet, I was having trouble putting my finger on it.
After a while, I figured it out. And the thing is, while I agree that DRM is a terrible idea, what I realized is that it's irrelevant. The problem isn't DRM (though DRM doesn't help). The problem is that Amazon (and Apple, and Google) aren't selling files. They're selling a service. And without some sort of legal framework to allow it, nobody else can compete with that.
So just to get started here, you need to stop thinking of what's being sold here as a file. It's not. What Amazon is selling is a web site you can use to read your books.
This should be clear if you can get past some of the (apparently, from comments) common misconceptions:
A) You don't need a Kindle to read an Amazon book. You can read them in a web browser. Or using a phone app. The same is true of Google books (indeed, it appeared that Amazon was just copying Google when they implemented this). Yes, it works in Linux.
B) You don't need the file, either. You can always just download it again and again. What you need is login credentials.
C) The file doesn't matter. Seriously. This is the point: Amazon is selling a way to get things (ebooks) and manage them in a pleasant fashion.
Nobody (well, almost) likes dinking around managing files all the time. People hate running backups. People forget where they put their files. Files get corrupted. It's a hassle.
Sure, if you buy a DRM product, you don't really own it. It's revokable. The company might fold. That's all true.
But the experience of going to Amazon (or Google) and having them manage all your stuff is just so much better, people are going to keep doing it. And from the customer's point of view, being able to get it in a web browser or an app is perfectly fine. There's no functional lock-in when it comes to using this stuff for most users. Sure, maybe Amazon will be dicks and try to block the Google books web site on a Kindle, but probably not. (The odd one out, of course, is Apple, which steadfastly refuses to play nice with others)
Of course this is in fact going to lead to a monopoly, just like Windows did. People are going to use the big two or three (at most) and that's it. And that's bad.
But being able to move your files around is irrelevant. If you want real competition to be possible, you need people to be able to move their library service around. You need to be able to hit a button and have all the Kindle books on your Amazon account appear in your Google account. And that simple isn't possible without some sort of law.
Of course, for the publishers, this still isn't going to help because of the other thing Amazon has: an actual good web site. People don't like maintaining dozens of accounts, or dealing with merchants that may or may not be shady. It's a hassle. Far better to just go to the big name with consistently mediocre customer service and somewhat useful recommendations and reviews.
That will depend on the contract. How much say will I have in the cover design? Do I get a choice in who edits the book? Is there a stringent non-competing works clause that puts unfair restrictions on how I can develop my writing career? Is there a sensible reversion clause or have that stops the publisher hanging on to the rights forever? And what happens if the publisher goes bust?
Plus there's the problem of avoiding all the flying pigs while I'm considering this fantastic deal.
I love the Mars trilogy, so I went to check. I'm pretty sure what you've bought is "The Martians", a collection of short material flagged as being connected to the Mars Trilogy, which IS under four quid. As far as I can tell you can't buy the mars novels, or any but the last couple of his works, on kindle UK at all.
Which is a shame: I really want the Three Californias.
I'm not so sure of all the details, but that doesn't look a crazy way of looking at the problem. But the question of what Amazon are selling doesn't change the dangers in the monopoly/monopsony situation which Amazon have created. It might affect some of the possible solutions, but they all come down to the existence of alternatives to Amazon.
Have Apple figured out what they're doing? It's likely. The problem is that the DoJ seems unable to recognise a monopoly. and are disrupting a possibly ill-planned counter to that monopoly.
There's an old British joke (names of organisations have changed): why is there only one Monopolies and Mergers Commission? This affair might be taken as an example of why a single regulatory agency might not be so wonderful idea. The other agency could "win" by spotting the blindingly obvious.
About that... have a look at CASH Music, which is an example of another creative industry's attempt at (near-)complete disintermediation.
"Speaking out against DRM was, as more than one editor told me over the past decade, potentially a career-limiting move"
For what it's worth, I've been arguing against DRM at Macmillan for years, and while I haven't won the argument yet, I've never felt it limited my prospects or damaged my standing.
Just a data point -- I'm not gainsaying anybody else's experience.
"You don't need a Kindle to read an Amazon book. You can read them in a web browser. Or using a phone app. The same is true of Google books (indeed, it appeared that Amazon was just copying Google when they implemented this). Yes, it works in Linux."
No it doesn't. Unless you have a physical Kindle, or a copy of the Kindle software (which works only on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android) you can't purchase books in the 'cloud reader'.
And Amazon weren't doing it to copy Google, but to get round Apple. Apple insisted that any book sales through the Kindle software on iOS devices include a commission to them, so they created an optimised-for-iOS website for people to read the books on their Apple devices without giving Apple a cut.
I had hoped that the Google Books debacle would have been the test case that created a regulated "dumb pipe" that spat out e-books. Sure, the original plan would've resulted in the same monopolistic practices that Amazon is engaging in, but the blatant mission of housing all the books ever would more immediately attract regulatory action. One solution in that case would be making online book storage and distribution something like a public utility. Google or some independent agency would have all the books and receive a set rate to process payment per contractual instructions attached to each book. Before the settlement imploded, it looked like Google was nearly amenable to something of the sort. If the judge had laid some ground rules, and Congress had managed to address the orphan works problem we might have had a kludgy but regulated and workable alternative to various walled gardens fighting each other for supremacy.
Amazon is just a retailer that increasingly doesn't have to care about books as a product line. If they wanted to be supervillains and demolish the entire publishing industry, they really could manage it without unduly disrupting their bottom line. It's conceivable that they might want to take down publishers and established authors simply because contract negotiations with that many savvy suppliers is a headache. Since there are competitors, it would be hard to maintain an anti-trust action. Anti-trust law tends to work in industrial terms and would not likely take into account the non-fungibility of books. Amazon very well could show that they don't have a dominant enough position to control the market in books as a whole-- just the good books.
I worry that Amazon is such a big player that win or lose they're going to be detrimental to the publishing industry. If they follow their current trajectory, they will be able to exert iron control over the entire industry. If they crash and burn or get taken out by legal action, they're responsible for enough sales that authors everywhere would be scrambling until someone else eventually comes along.
Just looking at the direct effect that supermarkets have exerted on the industry in past decades-- pricing pressure, format, etc-- and how they are a tiny segment of retail compared to Amazon's position. The potential for harm is scary.
Patrick, I could name names at Hachette. However, the vibe changed rather dramatically a few months ago. Can't think why ...
Alas, the Google Books settlement (RIP) was flawed for a whole bunch of different reasons which are too tedious to drag up in public at this point, seeing that it's dead and gone.
(A good part of our woes boil down to the particular model of copyright we've ended up with. It's pervasive, it's broken, it has unpleasant failure modes that were utterly unpredictable at the time it began to assume its shape, and it's mandated by international treaty laws.)
I enjoyed every part of this article, except this: "This fear is of course an idiotic shibboleth—we've had studies since 2000 proving that Napster users back in the bad old days spent more money on CDs than their non-pirate peers."
Napster users are not otherwise equal to their non-pirate peers. It is likely that Napster users were attracted to Napster BECAUSE they spent more on CDs and, therefore, stood to benefit the most from piracy. If so, the implication of the quoted sentence, that piracy encourages spending, is false. If so, the author included a shibboleth in a sentence intended to identify a shibboleth.
Great article, though.
The thing is though that Amazon doesn't represent disintermediation in the classical sense (the sense that we all talked about enthusiastically in 1995). What it represents is actually reintermediation - because if you want to sell a book, it has to be available via Amazon.
Disintermediation isn't disintermediation when you're turning yourself into a layer between the creator of the work (the author) and the consumer of the work (the reader). All Amazon has done is taken advantage of the internet to displace other intermediaries.
Libertarianism - I'm a libertarian (for values that say that if John and Jane Doe indulge in extreme BDSM in private that's no-one business bar their own as long as they don't try to force Jo Bloggs to join them in a 3some against Jo's will, as long as I don't place others at risk I should be allowed to drive as fast as I want... This does not remove the Does of their responsibility to not flog people who don't ask to be flogged, or to stop doing so when asked, or me of my responsibility to slow down when passing a school at 08:55 on a schoolday...)
Amazon - Yes, I buy stuff from Amazon, but not just entertainment media products. I've bought razers, DVD players, clothing, model kits, partly on convenience (for values of convenience that say it's more convenient to read a website and get stuff by post 3 to 5 days later than to soend £200 and 3 days on a trip to shops that offer me an actual choice), and partly because I'm finding vendors through Amazon who're charging less including P&P than the retail sticker price that the maker's website and all high street (include other "name" websites) all normally charge.
Oh indeed. The Google Books Settlement was a warty beast that deserved to die without some serious revision help from people that just weren't involved in the process. I was a librarian when the scanning started and conceptually I couldn't help rooting for a fait accompli of Google having every book ever and forcing international law to be rewritten to accommodate such a handy thing.
I suspect that the next time we have a bite at that apple it will be when some entity like the Pirate Bay figures out a secure way to aggregate and deliver copies of all the content on the planet. Unfortunately, it will likely be Amazon or some similar company reducing authors to the same state as session musicians that will justify tossing books into the hopper along with software, music and movies. By then the idea of a regulatory framework or payment system will be long gone.
Mitigating, but while the color models are doomed (or will be thinly veiled tablets, the way the Nook Color is heading), but the e-ink models aren't going anywhere, backlit screens are uncomfortable to read by a decent chunk of the population (completely aside from the ability to finish a book before the battery dies).
With the exception of the tiny subset of the population neophilic enough to have an e-ink reader but not to have a smartphone or tablet, you can expect anybody still using e-ink to continue to do so pretty much forever.
Boycotts and courts are not the answer.
The answer is age old. It's called competition. The barriers to entry are not too high (a well done website.) But you do have to become competitive. Which means...
What does Amazon do right? First it's a brand. To compete, you need to develop a brand (which will not happen over night.)
Then realize you have two sets of customers: authors and readers. What do each need and want?
Readers need to be able to find what they want which includes easy purchase of a reader device. No-DRM. Reader reviews and suggestions. They want to download, read and share without the need to become a tech. wizard.
Authors need editing, cover design, publicity, etc., without a large upfront cost. Let the author set the price of his work and give a flat commission to the brand (20%?)
Keep it simple for everybody. Compete.
These solutions only work for established author, not many people are going to back a kickstarter project from an auther that has no previous work to back them up, that means years of giving crap away for free before you can consider hiring an editor.
How exactly would reputation systems deal with genre seperation? A book can be a massive bestseller and still fail to appeal to people who aren't fans of the genre. If you just ignore people who don't like the style of the book you're just left with a bestseller list (with the same self-reinforcing problems bestseller lists have now).
Hmm, there are massive privacy implications, but you could set things up to consider rep entirely from people who have similar taste to you, which I suspect is the same thing Amazon is doing...
I can see how Amazon sucks for suppliers and their relative monopoly on reliable online shopping makes them hard to ignore for physical items.
I may be harsh when I say this, but I blame suppliers alone for not competing with Amazon on ebooks, and that includes the authors. Publishers are being stupid? That's an opportunity for disruption: several authors could collaborate to make it easier for authors to self-publish, with things like an easy way to hire reliable editors.
20 years ago I didn't know either of those booksellers existed - though I spent ages in Eason's, Hodges Figgis, Waterstone's, etc. Amazon is a gorilla in the market this side of the pond too, though, and that's new.
"Patrick, I could name names at Hachette. However, the vibe changed rather dramatically a few months ago. Can't think why..."
And yet, if you scroll to the end of the article here [1], there's a quote from the CEO of Hachette made just two weeks ago, and it seems that he's still in favor of DRM. Maybe he's the 70-year-old billionaire, but until he kicks the bucket, I don't see change happening. Or maybe that publishing house will have to go out of business. Quite frankly, as long as they engage in what I as a book-reading consumer consider to be hostile practices, it's going to be very hard to make me care...
[1] http://paidcontent.org/2012/03/31/419-will-hachette-be-the-first-big-6-publisher-to-drop-drm/
Somewhat off-topic, but the self-publishing evangelists have struck a nerve with me.
I don't see the self-publishing mantra of tearing down the current publisher model completely and having authors strike out on their own being at all sustainable. In the long run, we would probably end up with publishing houses again-- all of the off-loaded tasks of editing, marketing and contract negotiation would encourage those specialists to club together rather than be completely freelance. The groups that are best at providing these support services would be able to be selective about who they represent, and likely their mark on the work would be enough added value to be marketable. So we're back at gatekeeping and tiers based on quality.
It's possible the interregnum of the book market being made up of unedited slush, vanity projects, and a reduced output of established authors working without a financial net would sour the public on reading altogether. If not, demand for more and better work would attract capital to recruit and maintain good authors and voila the book advance is reborn.
Rather than cheer the fiery death of the major publishers, I would prefer that they just manage to reform enough to quit sucking at all of those tricky technology things. Getting out from under their media conglomerate empires would help immensely.
A more fragmented market with lots of viable publishers would likely be better than the way things are now. Making every author a publisher seems like way too far to go. Pitting each author individually against their primary employer/buyer (Amazon in this case) without backup is just awful.
I'm curious about Amazons ambivalent attitude to piracy. They know exactly what you have on your kindle every time it synchronises, but the don't seem to care if it is packed with sideloaded publications of dubious origins. This alo applies to books from their own bookstore that they know haven't been purchased by that user. The only thing they seem to care about is not being seen as responsible. Is this part of their plan?
Pedantic alert! Dante's deepest hole notwhistanding, of course. How is it that this man's concept of hell fas so pervaded Western culture and yet the "Hell Freezes Over" quip has always ignored that circle in which the actual Satan resides?
Not to mention the Inuit who took on christian beliefs initially insisted hell should be in the sky and cold, versus heaven which would be warm and protected below ground.
People only reading half the book?
Robert Horley @ 283: they could be ambivalent and say "I can't see it," or they could be proactive and delete suspected pirate material, and then deal with the volcanic backlash after Amazon eats all the Calibre news source epubs, Smashwords self-published work, free zines, etc. When people talked upthread about Amazon's commitment to customer service, they weren't fooling: they know better than to pull this kind of stunt.
There are good reasons for Amazon not to be too picky about what's on their customers kindles, and not just a nod-and-wink at privacy.
Consider what would happen if AMZN appointed themselves the police and took a look at what's on my Kindle. They'd find all sorts of stuff that "shouldn't be there" -- copies of "Hull Zero Three" by Greg Bear and "Children of the Sky" by Vernor Vinge that I didn't buy, for example. Other stuff like "Impulse" by Stephen Gould that they don't even sell.
But if they tried to remotely delete them ...?
I could nail them in court. All three of those items are on my Kindle because I was asked to cover blurb them, either by the author or their editor. And the one AMZN doesn't sell isn't going on sale for another eight months.
Am I atypical? Sure. But I'm not alone, and for Amazon or any other ebook platform vendor to start policing their customers' devices too closely would be an open invitation to a class action lawsuit.
For Hell to have "frozen over" requires all of it to be covered with ice, not just one part of it.
(Hell in Norway is the other possibility. I'm now annoyed to note that I passed within a kilometre of it back in January without registering it at the time. Hmm, we even went through the Hell Tunnel. Oh well. I can report that the vicinity, while snowy, was not frozen over.)
4 a month is a lot? Eesh. I bought and read (kindle app) the entire Wrinkle in Time Quintet, plus 1 more, this weekend!
(and as a side note from someone else's comment, I reread regularly. I have an inordinate number of ebooks that are repurchases of books I've owned physical copies of for years. It's so very easy to buy something I'm in the mood to reread while traveling for work....
The president of the Authors Guild, Scott Turow, said, "The irony of this bites hard: Our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition."
[Op-Ed, "E-book overkill Justice Dept. trustbusters should've left Apple and book publishers alone.", Michael Shermer, Los Angeles Times, April 16, 2012]
The Kindle, particularly more recent, more inexpensive versions, is what’s driving the boom in e-publishing. Those other ways of reading ebooks have been available for years, and yet ebooks never became popular.
So while you can do all those things, people aren’t interested in doing them. They want to read their ebooks on inexpensive epaper devices.
I’m not so sure. Microsoft and Yahoo did it. I’d end your sentence on the word “Kindle.”
You may be right about that — this might be an area where aggressive regulation seems to step in. Unfortunately, this is precisely the kind of regulation that society currently has a superstitious dread of.
"For what it's worth, I've been arguing against DRM at Macmillan for years, and while I haven't won the argument yet, I've never felt it limited my prospects or damaged my standing."
Yes, but you're in the Flat Iron building, so (a) you get an exemption for cool, and (b) you can ram other buildings like in Monty Python :)
I just don't see any reason for Amazon to take on the role of copyright police on their devices. It will cost them money and not make them any more money. It's not their job.
Also, IANAL or Cory Doctorow, but I think it would open Amazon open to liability by removing the company from the safe-harbor protections of DMCA.
"I'm curious about Amazons ambivalent attitude to piracy. They know exactly what you have on your kindle every time it synchronises, but the don't seem to care if it is packed with sideloaded publications of dubious origins. This alo applies to books from their own bookstore that they know haven't been purchased by that user. The only thing they seem to care about is not being seen as responsible. Is this part of their plan?"
I'd put my money on 'yes'. The minute that Kindle started roaming your computer and screwing with your stuff (so that you noticed) is the minute that they'd lose massive market share.
Digression Once the big box store has killed off every competiting mom'n'pop store within a 50-mile radius, where else are people going to shop?
That's a great line, but I'm not sure how often it happens in Real Life.
I moved to a small town (population 22,000) a decade ago. Two years later, Wal-Mart came to town.
Downtown has changed: we now have boutique stores, restaurants. They knocked down the mill that was the core of the downtown area (it was already closed), built an office block on the site.
The two hardware stores are still in here. One I patronize because the guys running it know stuff. And also my son likes the boutique root beer they sell at the counter. The other expanded into equipment rental. They seem to be doing fine, although I don't know their financial particulars.
Wal-Mart is where I go when I need something after hours, like a plumbers snake.
The existing smaller but chain retail stores are still here. The area where Wal-Mart went up has gone from a weedy dozen acres next to a quarry to a series of strip malls with yet more small stores and restaurants.
"I could nail them in court."
Actually, you could not. They'd waive the EULA in the judge's face, and then take you away for sacrifice (like it says on page 666 of the EULA).
I do enjoy the drive-bys dropping in with the "music/video is easy to produce and distribute online, therefore obviously so are books" opinion.
Or we can re-write it as: The mouse and the elephant are both grey, therefore obviously they can both fit through a letterbox.
Simple, really.
(Sorry, more sarcasm.)
That's not quite true... You can read anything you buy at AMZN on any kindle software, which runs on PCs, Android, iOS and of course the actual Kindle hardware.
So you're correct in that you're stuck in the walled garden, but the garden isn't locked into the kindle hardware.
And you can read non-DRM books on Kindle. (I know you didn't say you couldn't, but just wanted to throw it out there.)
Charlie writes:
What is this "rest of the supply chain" of which you speak?
Amazon Global Publishing will con-veniently cover all print markets...
(someone will pip up about Hollywood / film rights next. Bezos plans an app for that, too...)
Serious Reply: Charlie is in the United Kingdom, and there are several relevant statute laws which don't appear to have an equivalent in the USA. A general legal principle is that a contract can't create a breach of statute law. I suspect that there are EULA terms in anything from the USA which would be stamped on by any court in Europe.
Frivolous Reply: Amazon would never see anything untoward, Charlie's Kindle is remarkably well-laundered.
I actually don't know what the statistics are, but the overwhelming majority of the people I know read ebooks on their cell phones and tablets. Some of them have a Kindle too, but that just means they have more than one device they access the books on.
The biggest advantage of the actual Kindle in this regard is in my view is the battery life (admittedly a side effect of the e-ink), not the fantastical greatness of the display.
Came across this yesterday, a recent series from The Seattle Times:
Behind the Amazon.com smile.
@300: "Charlie is in the United Kingdom, and there are several relevant statute laws which don't appear to have an equivalent in the USA."
I would like to know more, from Dave Bell, Charlie, any commenter here, or hotlinked useful citation.
Heh, you seem to have partly replied to yourself: any reasonable reputation system will be more fine-grained than a simple scale; when my tap is leaking, I want someone who has a good reputation as a plumber, and I don't care what reputation they have as a classical singer. For some of their other reputations, it may even be illegal for me to care.
In any case, genre separation is not the problem, the author can do that quite reliably. The reputation system is for sorting through what's good and what's not.
As for reputation systems vs what Amazon is doing, sure, it's a kind of reputation system. However, you don't want to hand the keys to the reputation system to a private company, not if you can help it.
So why don't the publishers cut out the middle man, and sell their books directly to the consumer, at the prices they want to charge? The big six, especially, don't really NEED Amazon. They can tweet/blog/promote their own releases, have their own "recommended" method, maybe even going one up on Amazon. Let's say I like a book, like Scorpio Races. I could specify what I like about it: Pace, style, characters, genre, etc, and they'd tell me something else they publish that I'd like too. Make the ebooks work across platforms, no DRM, and let me share it the way I would a physical book.
Yes, there might be some piracy, but as someone who used to pirate? The main reason I did was because I wasn't sure I was going to like the music/book/movie, and I didn't want to spend what little money I had for entertainment on things that were longshots. Piracy led me to discover a lot of awesome artists, that I ended up buying the whole collections of, once I could afford it. To me, it's no different than checking something out of the library, just more convenient. And, in the case of movies, I didn't need to sit through 20 minutes worth of BS before getting to the menu. If you make the content easy, cheap, and accessible, people will buy it.
I myself don't know how to crack the Kindle books, but I am to assume that if I were to, wouldn't I be a target for a lawsuit, if Amazon wanted their ebooks back? Wouldn't they be able to tell if I changed the code?
Charlie, I don't suppose you know a publication date for Impulse? Searching Gould's site doesn't seem to show anything.
Personally, I'm not sure I'd take an agent in the US, if only because there are no limits on who can be an agent in the US.
That said, I'd certainly contact an attorney with experience negotiating contracts, every time I have to negotiate a contract. And I'd hire an accountant to help work through the receipts. The nice thing about these people is that they work for flat fees, rather than 10% of something (something ranging from 10% of your advance to 10% of your lifetime earnings, depending on what you negotiated with your agent).
As for turning an agent into your publisher, that's about as bright as marrying your divorce attorney. The attraction might be there, but who's going to negotiate for you when things get rocky?
Great blog post. However the comments chain has a bias to the desires of the author community and not the realities of their end consumer's price preferences. As a generic reader I don't want to buy most of the services bundled in the price of a book. Agents? Not interested, please take amazon's standard T&Cs. Printing, distribution, returns and working capital? Well yes, but only the $0.01 e-logistics costs. Typesetting? Editor should do the small bits that are not irrelevant anyway due to reflowable e-readers. Marketing? Hell no, inefficiently wasteful spend. Maybe this is part personal, but much like Hollywood movies I rarely find top ten books to my taste, so that's a lot of dollars aimed at the median consumer creating little value add for me. The only marketing spend I want as a consumer is R&D on the recommendation algorithm (inc. some human input from editors and readers) so I receive this 'marketing' spend only at point of sale and only targeted to me.
In fact the only parts of the chain I really value are author, editor and recommendation (nb. all largely fixed costs, hence suggesting a low price high volume pricing strategy in most cases). Amazon IMHO are vulnerable to competition on the latter two elements (I've given up trying no-names on kindle due to wasting too much time reading unedited dross where I did not understand the recommendation). Google, Netflix, Apple, Facebook etc all get recommendation engines (increasingly more than Amazon which has been filling my inbox with spam of late). Also, while dinosaurs, some of the big six may survive if they gut their marketing departments (or spin these off as add agencies focused on top 10 authors only), define more standard T&Cs (which they will get away with with their new authors, whereas the big names who could negotiate a better deal will anyway be hiring editors by the hour and publishing direct on amazon etc) and change business model to promote not authors (who are fundamentally un-ownable now you can easily self or amazon publish) but rather their own editorial abilities. E.g by promoting both the publishers name and the editors name in ebook titles (and refuse to sell to stores where these are not equally as browsable attributes as author and title - unlike movies currently I only rarely know the editor/publisher of my favourite books) and redirect remaining marketing spend to fund fan/reader groups to gain 'seed knowledge' to push recommendations as to who will like their new authors (ie feeding 'if you liked the books of Charles Stross, why not try Richard Winslade's new opus' into amazon's recommendation engine, but with an eye to maximise the authors/editor/publishing houselong term brand appreciation rather than short term sales through erroneous linking only to top 10 authors).
On a related point, I tend towards the the argument 'FFS it's only mainstream books not medical supplies, why do we care so much if a company that has profited diddly squit in 20yrs gets a monopoly in a low entry barrier market by eliminating a bunch of costs consumers don't value'.. However if you happen to be a competitor/publisher, I do think some posters are underestimating the barrier to entry of the users past purchase library if DRM survives. I believe the habits of the average consumer will alter to start reading certain books more than once when he carries them with him anytime a sentimental urge hits. So the library has a real monetary value quite aside from humans psycological collecting habits. Now you may say 'that lock-in is only as great as the hassle of downloading a drm stripper'. However most people won't and even among those who know how, I for one would feel uncomfortable uploading details of my stripped library to a competing store for fear of a knock on the door from the copywrite cops (dont fancy explaining to a judge that I only strip it if I own it). The consequence is that Amazon may end up with the only recommendation engine that knows my reading habits (inc what i tried and gave up) and that is a major barrier to entry (even if I try a new service, I don't come back as the recommendations are rubbish). All of which is just another way to agree that Charles is right and that replacing drm with watermarking is the only viable plan c for publishers (though I'd also suggest to add in my cost cutting plan above and hire a tech firm like kobo etc. to launch their own brand Facebook linked e-reader apps with a 6month release window advantage on their own big name authors while they still have locked-in big name authors to speak of!)
Thanks and sorry to be so verbose, this post is probably a good example of why editors are still needed.
There's also the 1984 issue, in that case Amazon did delete what Amazon demonstrably knew were definitely infringing copies, as they had been sold by Amazon in areas where the book was still in copyright. And they faced a massive backlash. On that instance Amazon were vulnerable to being sued by the Orwell estate if they didn't act when placed on notice and faced significant negative publicity if they acted.
Following the debacle Amazon changed the contract terms so they couldn't do this. Before hand if they were aware of the breach and didn't act they could be sued for not taking reasonable action to prevent further harm to the right holder after being placed on notice, both from further sales of the unlawful content and by revoking previous unlawful sales and refunding the customers. With the changes in terms the revoking of sales would be a breach of contract in itself and therefore would not be a reasonable approach to take when placed on notice.
If Amazon are unaware of infringing content they have a pretty good defence for doing nothing about it, and have actually amended their contract so they have a decent argument for going very slow when they can't deny that they know about infringing content.
As for turning an agent into your publisher, that's about as bright as marrying your divorce attorney
I can however point to the opposite case: Colin Smythe used to be Terry Pratchett's publisher. He very sensibly realised that his publishing business was entirely the wrong scale to cope with Terry's popularity, and renegotiated to become his agent instead.
(He still publishes, but he's very much a traditional gentleman publisher.)
One thing to keep in mind that steam isn't just about games, at this point it's also about the platform. A lot of times I'll buy on steam, even it is slightly higher priced, partially because it's an easy way to manage my games.
Re: O'Reilly & Amazon. Yes, Amazon sells O'Reilly titles at lower prices than O'Reilly. If there's less than $5.00 difference, I buy from O'Reilly; otherwise I buy from Amazon. But then I go to O'Reilly, pay them $4.99, and download non-DRM *.mobi, *.pdf and (if I wanted) *.epub files of the book. Win-win.
Amazon facilitates buying *mobi texts from them, but they don't insist on it. Third-party files aren't "suspect" in fact, Amazon facilitate loading them by providing an email address for the purpose. They advise you to check out Project Gutenberg and other out-of-copyright sources for free texts. And they allow 3rd-party publishers to email their *.mobi texts to your Kindle address for downloading.
Finally, you're not required to keep texts on the Cloud to view them on other devices. That's an option for saving disk space & forgoing file management, not a requirement.
I have about 75 books on my Kindle. I think 2 are newly released books "Big 6" titles purchased from Amazon at full price. A few are "daily deals" or other discounted items. Most are out-of-copyright texts downloaded from Amazon. The rest are from O'Reilly (some via Amazon, some not) and Pragmatic.
Take a look at the Kindle forums on Amazon. The real threat to publishing is all the readers who think most of the cost of producing a book is in the paper and ink, so no e-text should cost more than $5.
anonemouse & bellighame Erm, Hell has ALEADY frozen over ... according to the only man supposed to have toured it. See Cantos: XXXII - XXXIV "Divine COmedy " book I.
http://io9.com/5902247/could-book-publishing-suffer-the-same-fate-as-the-comic-book-industry
I suppose the most obvious answer is the same one as the author who doesn't want to design their own books might give - because they don't want to waste time and resources doing something that they don't really initially at least know about when someone else can do it better and they can share the proceeds equitably. But you know what's better than one other entity helping you sell yout stuff? A lot of other entities helping you sell your stuff, each of them bringing their own skills.
There are also the various holds that Amazon and other users of strong arm tactics have over publishers, from most favoured nation terms, which make it harder to compete on price, to the fact that Amazon might just delist every one of your books, print and e, if you look at them funny. You need deeper pockets than most publishers have to ride that tiger.
I'm not really sure what the endpoint of saying that publishers (or authors) need to compete with - for which, all too often, read 'kill' - Amazon is when really we just need an Amazon that doesn't make dick moves. It sounds a bit like saying that if you don't want your employer to exploit you either quit and start your own business or shut up. Plus, if every publisher did this at roughly the same time...
I don't believe it has been assigned a definite publication date yet -- what I read and offered a quote for is a submission-grade mauscript, not yet edited.
"... the philosophical issue of DRM, which on a personal level I find unnecessary for the books I write, and which from a business point of view may actually become an economic hindrance to publishers in the long run. Charlie Stross mused about this recently, and I recommend his thoughts to you. Other authors may feel differently than I do on the philosophical and economic desirability of DRM for their work, and that’s fine, and I support their choices. My belief is every author should have the ability to say how their work is presented to consumers in the marketplace." DRM On My Books April 16, 2012 By John Scalzi http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/04/16/drm-on-my-books/
Correct, insofar as being a literary agent is not a statute-defined profession. In fact, I'm not aware of any educational or professional development framework for training agents; it mostly happens via informal personal apprenticeship. However, it takes little effort -- just a bit of common sense -- for an author to do the basic due dilligence ...
You look at (a) their background, (b) their client list, and (c) their business structure. That should tell you 95% of what you need to know in order to decide if they're what you need.
If the agent has a bunch of "name" clients you've heard of, this is a good/bad sign. Good because it means they know what they're doing, bad because a new client will be relatively low down the pecking order. Good again because you can approach a client and ask, "would you recommend your agent to represent me?"
If you don't recognize their clients but they're part of a big name agency, then what you're looking at is a junior agent with lots of room for new clients but also with a solid framework within which senior agents will mentor them.
And if they've got no track record at all as an agent, it's nevertheless worth checking their background.
When I hooked up with my current agent ... she had no clients: I was Patient Zero. However, (a) she had a long and visible career as a senior editor in my genre sector behind her, and (b) she was publicly switching careers and teaming up with a well-known agent to form a new business. So I was reasonably confident that she knew the business, that I'd be reasonably high on her list of priorities, and she had a mentoring arrangement in place for deaing with the stuff she didn't know.
So: not as fraught as you might think, as long as you apply some common-sense precautions when vetting prospective agents and don't let your desires blind you to potential problems.
My understanding is that Amazon retains the technical capability to delete books from users' kindles. However, there's a mandatory requirement now that any such deletion may happen only on the personal say-so of Jeff Bezos himself, and would presumably happen only if the fallout from not doing so (big lawsuits?) would exceed the PR damage incurred by the process.
The prospect of a class action is likely to give Amazon pause in its international business, but here in the States the Supreme Court has recently upheld corporations' ability to write terms of service that require customers to waive their right to join a class action. Content providers like MS and Sony have already updated their TOS's to include such waivers, and if Amazon hasn't yet, I'm sure it will soon.
There IS still the court of public opinion, and as Brett @ 310 notes Amazon doesn't want to risk that kind of backlash again.
Note that Amazon stock is being sold at a PE of 134. They don't have to make a profit to let Bezos sell stock and pocket a lot of dollars. In the last 2 years this has been hundreds of millions of dollars.
It looks to me that his goal may be take home dollars not a lasting legacy company.
You have probably gotten this infer already, but the newest version of Requiem will crack and strip FairPlay DRM from books sold through the iBooks store.
So why don't the publishers cut out the middle man, and sell their books directly to the consumer, at the prices they want to charge? The big six, especially, don't really NEED Amazon. They can tweet/blog/promote their own releases, have their own "recommended" method, maybe even going one up on Amazon.
There are probably a lot of other reasons, but that would be more difficult for me as a book buyer. I couldn't use just one store to buy all the books, but instead I would need to use at least six other book stores, and I probably wouldn't remember which publisher sells which books without trying each of them. Amazon provides an easy marketplace for (almost) all the books.
That's not the end of it, of course. Most of my book-buying nowadays is roleplaying games, and many (small) publishers run their own web-stores. This means I use those stores to buy the books. I do it because it's my hobby, I follow the small companies closely and I can remember who publishes what.
This is probably also because I want to support the almost-hobby publishers. I don't have the same kind of devotion to the publishers of, for example, Charlie Stross, even though I do like his books.
That's one reason why not.
@320 - I think that any wifi-connected device (like the Nook) has this capability. People just know about Amazon because of the 1984 debacle.
Jonathan asked how the law concerning consumer contracts (including EULAs) differs in the UK. Well, in the UK we have The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999. This says in §5(1):
"A contractual term which has not been individually negotiated shall be regarded as unfair if, contrary to the requirement of good faith, it causes a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations arising under the contract, to the detriment of the consumer."
And in §8(1):
"An unfair term in a contract concluded with a consumer by a seller or supplier shall not be binding on the consumer."
So if Stross were to sue Amazon for remotely deleting the books on his Kindle, Amazon would not be able to use the EULA to avoid liability.
Actually, communism not only has been tried properly, but works fine. It has worked fine for hundreds of thousand years: communism is the default social mode for the Homo genus, and has been since before we tripled our cranial capacity.
The problem of communism isn't that it doesn't work since it does. It's that it doesn't scale. Communism works as long as each individual is capable of holding responsible all others individuals within the "community" sphere.
Communism breaks down against the Dunbar barrier. Once the number of people you're interacting with starts going above 150, you become incapable of managing their existence relative to yours. You become incapable of making sure they provide "according to their capabilities". Accountability breaks down, and with it the social compact.
And for hundreds of thousand years, we were incapable of dealing with that. As a result, everytime a social structure went against that limit, it broke into fragments that separated and no longer interacted; the social compact was restored, and the society went on.
Then we invented civilization instead of communism, and we no longer needed to break social units into smaller pieces.
Yes, that's the impression I've been getting lately, that he'll cash out at one point, once he's gotten a certain amount of assets / money.
However he'll need a lot more than a few hundreds of millions of cash to buy up Lockheed-Martin (or one of the few comapnies with real experience in getting a payload into orbit), once he realises that rocket science is a lot harder than he first thought when he started Blue Origin.
Amazon carries two main kinds of ebooks - books from Real Publishers, which cost ~50% more than mass-market paperbacks, and mostly-self-published ebooks in the $1-3 range. For instance, Rule 34 is US$7.99 for mmpb, $12.99 ebook, and they're apparently dumping the hardbacks at $10.38 (formerly $25.95, probably discounted.) I'm sorry, but to me an ebook is like a paperback book without the dead trees or associated distribution cost attached, and an ebook with DRM is like a ratty used paperback. (I guess they've got some price variation - Steven Brust's recent ebooks are $9.99.)
I got a Kindle as a vendor door prize at a trade show, so the price was right. It's wonderful for reading on airplanes, ok for reading at home, and useless for reading in the bathtub, and with help from Calibre, it's been great for reading books from Project Gutenberg, last year's Hugo nominees, books from DRM-free publishers, samples from Baen, etc. Amazon's Kindle ordering system is annoying enough that even aside from price I haven't used it to buy ebooks there, though I've happily bought dead-tree books and other merchandise from them in the past.
I do wonder if the reason that so many execs fear piracy so darn much is because it is what they'd do in a heartbeat if they could. It is pretty much a prerequisite of rising to the top in any industry that you be a sociopathic, opportunistic, fiend, it is their business model. They don't realise that most regular people (insomuch as there is such a thing as a "regular person") would not take an opportunity to chib their own granny for tuppence.
How are they going to do that? Bear in mind there's no wifi here, and even if I was inclined to pay for some kind of cellular-data service for a phone/pad thing, I regularly travel to places where there's no cellular (or dialup) phone service. And those are the places I'd most want to bring a reader device to.
Considering how few bookstores there are to serve the population, I'm guessing the vendors' attitude would be "F you, we have enough customers in urban areas, we don't need you."
I am about to publish an e-book through Amazon, and I will opt for no DRM restrictions so that my memetic message has a better chance to propagate far and wide across the Internet. I will also opt for the lowest possible price on my e-book. There is no reason why any e-book should cost more than U.S. #9.99 and the greedy publishers had better get used to the modern age. They are all a bunch of trust-fund kiddies anyway, and they want the glamor and cachet of being hoity-toity publishers without the existential angst that the rest of us live with. The People, Yes; The Poetry, No.
What i would like to know is exactly which devices cannot do this because amazon's "we promise not to do this again" does not fill me with confidence. They should not even be inspecting the damn things in the first place.
[If publishers went direct] I couldn't use just one store to buy all the books, but instead I would need to use at least six other book stores, and I probably wouldn't remember which publisher sells which books without trying each of them. Amazon provides an easy marketplace for (almost) all the books.
But intermediaries might fill in the gaps. You could imagine, say, LibraryThing (or something of its ilk) collecting reviews and gathering a comprehensive enough catalog to serve the discovery functions that Amazon does now (for at least some of their customers), while referring potential purchasers to the publishers' site (whichever it might be for a particular book) when they'd actually decided to buy.
(There are certainly precedents for this sort of thing --- travel aggregators like Orbit and Travelocity. Ror that matter, Abebooks will find used books from small sellers across the US right now if you know what you're looking for, though they're weak at best on current editions and "more like X" discovery.)
You know, looking through this thread, I realized Amazon reminds me a lot of another company - Sears, Roebuck & Co.
Back in the late 1800s, Sears offered something nobody else (in the USA, at least) was doing - a printed catalog where you could browse tens of thousands of items, from light aircraft and prebuilt homes to buttons and tableware. Just flip through the catalog and write your selections on one of the tear-out order forms, drop it in the mail, and you didn't even have to hitch up the horses and drive them to town.
Basically, the same thing Amazon is offering - a comprehensive catalog, fast (for the day) service, and things you probably couldn't buy locally, delivered right to your door.
Sears ran atop the US Postal Service - catalogs went out that way, orders came in that way, and orders were delivered that way. Amazon runs atop the internet and still uses the USPS for some of its shipping; at least, that's how some Amazon orders have shown up at my door.
Sears had a hammerlock on retail sales for generations. It finally ran head-on into something new - the local department store. Plus some suicidal mismanagement, of course. And now the wheel has turned again.
Looking further into the future, it's interesting to speculate what new thing might bring Amazon down.
Possibly but i don't think anybody really knows if for instance it 'calls home' when you connect it to usb, there are models of photocopier which do this for example. The carrier iq clusterfuck shows we have no real idea what is baked into off the shelf devices, rooting 'em has to be the only way really.
@336:
"local department store"
Make that, "local chain store."
Alain writes:
Elon has only put low hundreds of millions into SpaceX.
Rocket Science is a lot harder than he thought, too, but they're generating cashflow quite nicely now and have a perfectly workable medium launch vehicle and HLV in progress, and a nearly man-rated capsule.
Elon didn't buy BoeMart. And won't. He hired a few mammals out of BoeMart, but in a striking turn of events Boeing and LM both formed startup-like tiger teams to do their capsules, as they felt that their existing infrastructure would probably fail.
Honestly, I don't understand the Amazon animus. Everyone expects it to start turning on its authors (and customers) as soon as it succeeds in eliminating all competition. Nonsense! The company's core values include a customer-centric focus and a commitment to keep margins low. I have been thrilled at their ability to keep to those values. I have never had a bad customer experience from Amazon and believe me, I have bought a lot of stuff, including hundreds of e-books. I cannot imagine their turning on us and destroying the image they worked so hard for.
Bill, the MMPB of "Rule 34" has not been published yet, and won't be out until July. When it comes out, the ebook price will drop to match it.
You're comparing pre-orders with available products and drawing the wrong conclusion.
All this wringing of hands about Amazon becoming the next evil empire is wasted effort. Unfortunately, as a baby boomer, I am part of the last generation of book readers. Looks at the statistics over the last decade, fiction readership of books has be declining steadily. In other words, as future generations get older, the book (print or digital) is pretty much doomed, with the exception of some nonfiction works (and of course textbooks).
There is a missing comparison when comparing Amazon to the "traditional publishers," which relates to the fact that the trad pubs integrate into physical networks of brick and mortar stores.
If a book is to be published and distributed through Barnes & Noble (or Chapters, or WH Smith, or whatever chain one might consider), then books need to be physically distributed, generally in fairly small quantities, to each location. In my country, there are several hundred Chapters stores, and, generally speaking, any book that is to be distributed by Chapters gets distributed by nearly every location. There may be exceptions to that, but this is the common case, and it's worth poking at it a bit.
If I have a book that seems popular enough that they want to sell it, they have to pull in some number of crates of it, and distribute them across their supply chain.
A book that is not quite that popular will have a challenge getting chosen altogether.
And in practice, there may be a few copies of the book at each store, and, with the vagaries of peoples' desires, some stores sell out, perhaps leaving some readers unsatisfied, and other stores fail to sell all their copies.
Amazon (or, in my country, Indigo, a "branch" of the Chapters empire) changes this up. They can estimate sales, in much the same way that 'brick and mortar' stores do, but they do something rather different. They merely buy a few crates of that book. The "impedance mismatch" where some stores have too many copies and other stores have too few disappears. Rather, when someone orders a copy, they merely pull a copy from the box and ship it out.
And Amazon can lower their thresholds, which is nice for authors of slightly less popular works. That book on Erlang or Haskell, that wouldn't sell enough copies to make it worth hawking at a book chain that won't sell too many copies outside "tech neighborhoods," can sell nicely to just those that want it. And if that book turns out to be unexpectedly popular, they can pretty likely cash in on that more easily than someone sitting at the end of a supply chain that looks longer.
I didn't see anything on the incredible profit the publishing houses earn via DRM publishing. Perhaps the book sells for less, but the cost to produce the book is practically nothing, which means the profit percentage must be huge compared to traditional publishing. Times change, traditions change, and so must businesses. Viva the innovator who can create a new industry.
I realize you're probably a drive-by commenter, but for anyone else who is going to assert that ebooks should be free, or near so, because they're free to produce: Charlie has a link, right on the right side of his blog, that answers that. Common misconceptions about publishing
Printing a paperback book costs (see URL in link) about £2.20 if you want two thousand - some vanity-publishing services charge twice that, probably if you're printing ten thousand and don't mind them appearing in a container at Guangzhou dockside it'll cost less than half that. So you are making a couple of pounds per book more if you sell an ebook rather than a paperback for a given price.
Distributors are where the big money is; deals with small publishers for distributors who are distributing to lots of large bookshops might well ask to keep two thirds of the cover price!
Amazon definitely have the ability to remote-delete things from Kindles, because that's what enables them to allow you to refund ebooks; which is awesome, you can buy an ebook and, provided that you notice within a week that it's one that you would hurl at the wall were it on paper, you can get your money back!
And then there's the Kindle Select program for authors, which attempts to get (especially the popular ones) them to sell ebooks through Amazon only,by offering incentives, most of which will not pay off well except for the popular authors. But Amazon wants everyone, on the very reasonable grounds that nobody can actually predict which authors will become popular.
The fact that this will help competitors wither on the vine--oh, well. Amazon sees value in becoming the biggest slush pile on earth, because if they have rights to all of it, they'll have the rights to the gems. Unfortunately for their competitors, the vast proportion of ebook sales for non-well-known authors do come through Amazon, which gives the lesser known an incentive to go through with Kindle Select, thus adding to Amazon's advantage.
Given the limited space of most print publishers, and the fact that 90% of everything is crap also means that 10% of everything is not-crap, means that a lot of unknown authors are going to give up on print (often after several years of attempts) and move into electronic publishing.
Especially when some reasonably well-known published in print authors have also publicly thrown up their hands and moved to independent publishing. Of course, these people already have a fan base for say, Attack of the Rockoids vol. 32, which lesser known authors do not.
However--if one has to wait three years for a submission to be read by anybody, there are some good new authors who aren't even going to bother. I know one guy who had a reasonably well-known author for a mentor, who hand-delivered the manuscript to a well-known editor with that author's recommendation, and it really has been three years after the editor swore they'd look at it by Christmas. (I have read the book and I laughed my butt off, in a good way. Christopher Moore has competition).
So Amazon is trying to lock up all sides of the market, and the print publishers aren't doing very much to look at the author's side. They don't have the time to read slush, and I suspect have a select list of agents they pay attention to for new stuff.
I don't know what the solution to that end is going to be yet.
One perfectly good reason for the Amazon animus is that they treat their warehouse employees badly.
I'm no expert on the subject, but from my reading it appears that they are no worse than other online merchants.
Nonetheless, I am a frequent Amazon customer.
Non-"e-reader" Android devices (or cracked Android e-readers) running non-bookseller e-reader apps - I use a B&N Nook Color running the CyanogenMod Android flavour, and the Aldiko reader. This does make buying books on the go hard, though - which can be diluted as an issue by having Calibre serve your library over the internet.
Unfortunately, as a baby boomer, I am part of the last generation of book readers
This isn't actually a fact. Draw your own conclusions about dirty hippies, boys with funny haircuts, baggy/skinny trousers, etc, etc.
I think part of the reason Amazon is so railed against online is that Amazon serves the masses. It isn't a nice, neat, relatively hard to access, little club. It's just there and it has what you want. Mass market is always despised.
Elon Musk hasn't hired a few mammals from Boeing and Lockheed Martin, he's seduced thousands of top notch young engineers from those places (and other corps), to come and help him define and bring to fruit his space vision.
He's also seduced Congress, the White House and parts of NASA into thinking that his effort is vital to the survival of the US as a space faring nation.
The guy is a master seducer at the Steve Jobs level, and he has even more computer smarts than Steve Jobs ever had.
Most of all Musk is still very young. He can afford to put in 20 years of effrot in order to reach his goal to get to Mars, and in the process, bring along quite a few of his eager employees.
Can Jeff Bezos do the same?
Does he want to do the same?
There's no disintermediation possibility there, no excess fat to cut, no way to get to space any easier than the way Spacex is doing. It's all science, engineering science, engineering issues, and then still more engineering science which might in the end give some very bad answers.
While there is a remote possibility of a certain future cash flow for Blue Origin, it's very tiny (compared to the cash flow from selling TVs and other consumer electronics, and hum, er, books, on the Web) and it's heavily subsidized by US tax dollars. There's a sharp limit to that. There's an even sharper limit to the number of repeat trips by nerdy millionaires once they've flown once, just once, on a few orbits or on a sub-orbital flight.
Alain wrote:
He doesn't have thousands of employees, it's 1500 as of last month. Many came out of college or from non-aerospace fields. (Disclaimer, though no active project is going on, I have had discussions with SpaceX about buying launch vehicles for various projects in the past).
It is. Space activists understood the issue as soon as Columbia was done hitting the ground. NASA got it - very significantly - within the year after that. When Bush had his senior WH science people have NASA take the long step towards moving away from Shuttle and towards colonization, it was clear to everyone that basic manned access to LEO was not going to be NASA affordable anymore. They had to focus on going beyond. The Station people got right behind COTS. Dragon started development in 2004, and there were a number of competing projects running along by the time COTS solicitations went out in 2005. They didn't even win in the first COTS round.
During the original 2005 COTS industry day, senior persons at NASA who will remain nameless admitted to the assembled crowd of proposers that the Station was doomed to abandonment and burnup shortly after the last Shuttle flew if they couldn't find commercial cargo and eventually crew delivery services.
Perhaps. I never met Jobs, I have met Elon briefly.
Probably. Note that SpaceX becoming commercially viable is a necessary step along the ways; he can't fund much more R&D out of pocket, and their cashflow level just recently stabilized operations costs.
Probably.
Probably.
This is news? I've been doing space stuff since the 80s...
He's not in it to disintermediate. You're taking a narrow view of Bezos. You're suggesting that he's a one-trick pony.
You're also suggesting that suborbital hops are the totality of his goal. Which he's explicitly said goes out to Orbit and beyond, so I don't know why you'd say that...
Authors are not customers
Apologies for posting anon -- I am on my walled-garden iDevice and cannot be bothered to fill out the registration on it to create an account.
But still: Steam's customers are prone to voluntary vendor lockin? Have you TRIED any of the alternatives? They're horrible.
Having said that they carry their horribleness over when they cross publish on Steam too. No, EA, I do not want an account with you, nor you, Microsoft, I already have a Steam account. What's that? I can't play the game I just bought on asthma unless I create an account with you anyway? Bah!
And speaking of walled garden idevices... That would be 'Steam' not 'asthma'. Honestly?
"He's not in it to disintermediate. You're taking a narrow view of Bezos. You're suggesting that he's a one-trick pony.
You're also suggesting that suborbital hops are the totality of his goal. Which he's explicitly said goes out to Orbit and beyond, so I don't know why you'd say that... "
No, that,s not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting that there it is very unlikely that there is room in space for libertarian capitalists.
To get the steady stream of billions necessary to go to high obrit and then to Mars you have not only to accept money from big government bureaucracies, you also have to court them, seduce them, work with them, and of course see to it that taxes stay high enough to generate those billions.
Then again, maybe both SpaceX and Blue Origin will fail and maybe the French and the Germans will underwrite ESA funding for the British Skylon project and Bezos and Elon will eventually get to Mars by way of Heathrow and the Rosa Luxemburg Station.
I just can't wait to see the video of Speaker To The Plants cuting the ribbon to the hatch of the first true spaceplane.
Remember also that communism (in the Dunbar number limited community described here) happens among the wealthy, as well as the poor.
I'm pretty sure that "communism of the rich" has been tried as a governing strategy, and found wanting. Generally, it appears when bank presidents get wrist slaps for crimes that ordinary people go to prison over.
Alain wrote:
You had a funny way of saying that, then.
And I have little faith that your current statement is true. There's room in space for anyone who can afford to play there. Right now, that's essentially a bunch of telecommunications companies and five governments.
SpaceX was founded in part to try to get the ball rolling on the lowered launch cost raised launch demand curve which the economists thing is out there.
Also, because Elon wanted to launch this tiny little fractional-spin-gravity mouse biology test sat into orbit for a few months and was essentially launch providered into such a frustrating state that he was convinced he had to be able to do better. (Thank you, Mars Society...).
Alternately, one figures out how to do things with hundreds of millions of dollars instead of billions, and then with tens of millions of dollars, then with millions of dollars, then with less. And just goes and does them.
The "NASA WAY" of doing Falcon 1, Falcon 5 (now cancelled), and Falcon 9 would have been 3-8 times as expensive depending on how you cook the numbers. People were for a long time convinced he was cooking the books. Finally, the NASA cost model and DOD cost models have taken the SpaceX actual costs and manpower into account.
That's not to say everything they do will be 5x cheaper. But it's something. The more you open up and make cheaper, the more opportunity awaits.
Actually they are both very easy to produce and distribute online.
However, if you want to publish them online, that's a stone-cold bitch, because someone has to program the legal systems which run music and books into a website. The problem comes very close to being non-trivial.
I'm assuming a very fair contract for the sake of this thought experiment. The contract would have good flexibility, including a clause which says something like, "If you pay for the editor/copyeditor/cover artist, we will increase your reimbursement by X, as we are not bearing this expense."
Even that number is deceptive. It costs the publishers far, far less than that, even for smaller print runs, because of gang printing.
I had this same sort of conversation about digital comics, where people believe that the cost of producing the actual object the work is on is vastly more expensive than it is.
Charlie, thanks again for pulling back the curtain. I really enjoy your posts about publishing.
That being said, it seems like there are two sets of cases where you need your agent. One of them can be handled by software and should be part of the "package" under discussion. For example:
if bookssold=10,000 then charliespercentage=percentage+1
or whatever the actual numbers might be. Software can also handle issues like how long a book has been in print, or how many books you've written. (Though if you sold a book on Perl through O'Reilly instead of through Futuristic Publisher that might cause problems with the software - at that point you need someone to call Author Services and sit on hold...)
The other cases involve intangible issues that can't be handled by software, such as "Emma Watson says she wants to play Mo, so Charlie should get more money." Obviously it requires a human being to understand and negotiate this one.
You've also identified something that doesn't make sense to an outsider. Why are you negotiating financial stuff with your editor? Shouldn't the artistic functions and financial functions be handled by different people? Can you explain why this issue is handled by the editor instead of someone else? It seems like the same logic which says "Charlie should be spending his time writing books, so someone else handles the business end," would also say, "Patricia Neilsen Hayden should be editing books, not negotiating financial issues."
For the rest of us, what is "gang printing?"
Bezos definitely knows (at least now) how hard it is to get into space. And he hired a lot of experienced aerospace people for Blue Origin, and has done a pretty good job of giving them the freedom they need to do their job. It doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense from outside because they're so secretive (when I interviewed there, I had to sign a pretty restrictive NDA just for the interview), but they know what they're doing. It's just not my cup of tea (plus I didn't really want to move to Seattle).
To the person about big box stores driving out the local small stores when I moved to Nerang 25 years ago there was a Mitre 10 hardware store (Small franchise chain) at the post office strip mall on the quieter 'old' part of town across the river, a BBC Hardware (mid size chain) across the Highway, a small old school hardware store down the road from the supermarket centre sort of opposite the BBC which had been there for like decades - you could still buy individual nails and screws there - sorted into little boxes... and another small retail store in a strip mall up the road from where I lived. Then Bunnings the hardware equivalent of Wal Mart in Australia opened in a sort of out of the way but geographically central part of town. In three years only the little store up the road was left and he survived by going into swimming pool maintenance in a big way.
Charlie@341 - Thanks, that makes sense.
Just an example of EU consumer protection law, though I don't see anything which would directly apply to Amazon furkling around in my Kindle.
http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/cons_int/safe_shop/fair_bus_pract/ucp_en.pdf
There's a couple of items in the blacklist which might apply to Amazon's unfortunate habit of advertising items they aren't supposed to sell in Europe, because of local distribution rights.
At a minimum, if you do remote uploads you need to be able to check for free space. There's a less clearcut reason for deletion ability, in material such as newspapers and magazines.
I don't think there's a single good answer for all products and all readers.
Then again, maybe both SpaceX and Blue Origin will fail and maybe the French and the Germans will underwrite ESA funding for the British Skylon project and Bezos and Elon will eventually get to Mars by way of Heathrow and the Rosa Luxemburg Station.
I just can't wait to see the video of Speaker To The Plants cuting the ribbon to the hatch of the first true spaceplane.
That sounds almost crazy enough to be a plausible prediction. It might be something of a prestige project, but Europe has high speed rail. And David McAllister is State President of Niedersachsen. Sometimes reality starts to sound rather like a Japanese cartoon series...
Gene, you don't see anything about the huge profits publishers make, because it isn't true. You want to know why? here's how books are made. Note that the difference between a paper book and an ebook is the last couple of steps ... out of 17.
The "huge profit" you think is in there actually mostly goes to the supply chain -- either wholesalers and bookstores (each of whom make more than publishers and author combined) or to Amazon.
Tom, that's not what it costs to print a paperback book. That's what Grosvenor House would charge you for a shedload of paperbacks. GH are a profit-making business targeting ignorant self-publishers, and if you paid them that much you'd be ripped off blind. Actual costs for printing a paperback in quantity, I'm told are on the order of 50p in the UK -- more like 50 cents in the USA.
Alex, you did a bit of a fly by on my point: Equating the production of (professional or near-professional quality) music or video with that of books (specifically novels) is flat wrong.
(I do agree with your point that in the case of any produced content, it's easy to just throw something out onto the web, but without some kind of legal framework it is most definitely not published)
Alex R: Why are you negotiating financial stuff with your editor? Shouldn't the artistic functions and financial functions be handled by different people?
Because job titles do not reflect the reality of what people in various occupations do.
Let me give an example: one of my editors at a big six publisher. She's a senior editor. What this means is that her job is not to edit: it's to curate an imprint, which means acquiring new titles that fit within the imprint's brand identity, and managing a production line that emits 100-150 novels each year, coordinating with Marketing and Production and Sales to ensure that the incoming manuscripts are turned into professional-looking books. Her job is way too high-level to edit books in person: it'd be like a general officer trying to micro-manage a platoon. Just reading every title she acquires so she knows what she's talking about in the meetings is a full-time hobby for a voracious reader. So most of the editing is out-sourced, as is the copy-editing, and the proofreading, and the typesetting.
Do you want to know who edits my books that come out through this editor's imprint?
.... My agent.
But. This is just how things work with one publisher. Things work differently elsewhere. Other publishers keep different parts of the picture in-house. At Tor, for example, you'd find over a dozen editors working gainfully on the imprint that senior editor at $OTHER_PUBLISHER is responsible for, and each of them is acquiring, curating, and editing their own authors in their own sub-list.
(Which should explain, in miniature, why talk of ditching particular specialities as "unnecessary" is dangerous and deceptive, and why the nice clean lines of the block diagram of "the publishing process" don't actually always correspond to what's going on in real life.)
The difference in price between a paper and eBook is not paper minus 50p. It's paper minus (50p times percentage of the overall markup) from that stage onwards, minus physical distribution costs.
I do enjoy the drive-bys dropping in with the "music/video is easy to produce and distribute online, therefore obviously so are books" opinion.
Having spent 2 years independently producing an album, for both on-line and physical sale, writing the music, re-tooling the studio to record it well, networking with musicians across the world to find collaborators, recording, editing and mixing, sourcing professional mastering services, designing artwork, packaging, etc, sorting the legal requirements with performance and royalty agencies, sourcing ISRC and barcode data (mandated for online sales by the aforementioned Amazon and iTunes), identifying a digital distro company, engaging with online and print media post launch in the hope of the odd mention/play/review here and there, I can assure you that the word "easy" is not one that ever actually came to mind.
The end result might be consumed in maybe an hour whereas the end result of OGHs hard labour might take a little longer, but easy? Er.. No.
Every creative process looks easier from the uninformed outside.
"Painting? That Picasso dude, nah, that's easy! Just get some paint and a canvas and slap out a couple of rectangular women ... money for nothing ..."
"money for nothing and chicks for free." as Mark Knopfler sang.
Hope you don't think that I was trying to say that one is easy and one is hard, I was trying to point out that it's not really possible to equate the creative process for one medium meaningfully with that of another, and people doing so are almost always dead wrong.
In fact, it's seldom correct when comes to the creative process even in a single given medium to say anything like "$creative_artist was successful using $process, therefore everyone using $process will be successful".
Aside: Speaking as someone who couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, I have nothing but the greatest respect (even awe) for those who can and do create music.
I've heard that kind of argument about s/w writing. It usually runs along the lines of: Some teenage hackers have broken into secret military sites, so all you need to write your DSP algorithms and code them up in SHARC assembler to interface with custom C++ code is a bright teenager - why are you charging so much?
Corrollary for the "why are you charging so much", made by senior management within the software industry: Sure practically anyone can do your job, and what do you really do all day; so why are we paying you so much?
Not to mention s/w writing in the movies, where a teenage touch typist knocks out a few hundred lines of code a minute, while I spend a substantial portion of my time not typing at all.
And I can "write"* 7 statements a day.
Perfect code, knocks out a couple of hundred lines of perfect code, on a system that they've never seen before, that runs first time with no bugs.
Grrrr!
But it does take them several minutes to "break the encryption".
The distant popping noise you just heard, was my head.
I find myself repeating the mantra "it's just make believe" every time a scene involving computers shows up in a movie -- it's the only way I can avoid committing acts of not-so-random violence.
Exception for Jurassic Park, where the visual file mangler was part of an actual SGI X-interface.
Occasionally Hollywood gets it right, but I suspect that it's more by accident than design.
There's no such thing as a monopoly (except for state monopolies which are maintained by violence).
Even if Amazon were the only company selling books, they would still have to be competitive against others waiting in the wings for them to fuck up.
Notice that all companies with a large market share lose it eventually.
Rob Fisher: There's no such thing as a monopoly (except for state monopolies which are maintained by violence).
You are a doctrinaire libertarian and I claim my $5.
Seriously, you'll need to do better around here than simply to regurgitate talking points so old they're cliches.
Never mind computers, or indeed any other 'speciality' subject; so many films break basic physics - or indeed basic arithmetic - in ways that I knew were wrong before I went to college (or left primary school, with the maths) that I make an effort to turn my brain off before starting.
Mind you, a depressing number of authors do the same, even if it isn't nearly so universal. One of the books I read over the weekend featured a curse lasting exactly a hundred years[1]. The male lead was in his early twenties when the curse broke; it had been cast when his grandfather was about seven or eight. That's one hell of a generation gap, especially for minor nobility in twelfth century Ireland. (Or the scifi book where an interstellar communication lag of several seconds was explained as being due to the time it took a laser beam to travel several light-years, or....)
[1] also every other cliche you can name
Oh, the big game publishers can be horrible that much is true.
But the experience from buying directly from small publishers or developers, from smaller stores as Gamersgate or GOG has always been positive for me.
But I have to admit, that results in the fragmentation of the library and loses some of the features steam offers (which I personally do not care about). But the properties of steam that make it an attractive store discourage a section of it's users to look elsewhere. Which is what I wanted to express with 'voluntary vendor lock-in'.
A similar process can be expected at one point with ebook sellers. With a section of the customers going to the big known store where they already have access to their existing library. Regardless of better deals or unique content elsewhere. A positive message of the online game distribution process seems to be that specialized smaller stores seem to be viable in some genres. With the caveat that the number of games released is tiny compared to the number of books.
My main language is Ada; I may have used the word "exception" more advisedly than I first realised!
Now, I guess we'll all have to sit tight, get some pop-corn and see for ourselves how the situation will develop.
Either way, it looks like the only solution viable in the long-term would be a small flat-rate subscription fee paid to internet providers for all media-content consumed.
The crux lies in its distribution among the content-creators - in the absence of an Accelerando-style rating system plus the tracking of actual consumption of products it will be really tough to fairly distribute the gains.
Were there in existence a single infrastructure for users to get their media and vote their satisfaction once they've consumed it, apportioning profits to media-creators would be relatively easy.
Until then, the majority will buy from where its easiest, and the tech-savvy minority will use IRC and torrents to get what they want for free. If the copyright gangsters make torrent use punishable, as it seems to be happening, people will simply migrate to i2p where tracking ip's is architecturally impossible.
In the meantime, the temporary means I see for authors to reap some benefits from pirate populace is to include some tokens in their books allowing the "pirate" users to pay a small sum of money - at their own discretion - directly to the author. Something like the "donate" applets commonly used for apps in the android market, e.g. CoolReader's "bronze, silver, and gold" donation apps.
I will make a confession - as a Russian, I find it relatively expensive to purchase media-content at the exaggerated (at least for our economic conditions) prices. This goes for the works of Mr. Stross, as well. I am not going to purchase any hardcopy books - I simply do not need them. But if there were a simple point-and-click mechanism for donating, say, 5 to 10 bucks - I'd gladly use it to send my regards to the author of one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read. Perhaps even use it several times over a longer time period.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt because you also called it the "visual file mangler". That made me giggle.
@393: Chrisj, I would raise you the entire Star Trek canon (what is this "physics" of which you speak?), but I suspect that I've derailed the thread far enough already; I sense the ban-hammer hovering!
My point is not that libraries are doing something wrong, but that Amazon is providing a very good customer experience, and that's the biggest challenge we would face in trying to replace their monopoly/monosoly.
Which is why in the US so many "main street" businesses got destroyed by first malls, then big box centers.
When I was growing up we mainly had main street stores downtown. Town had 32K people. We lived 3 miles from it. Nearest bigger city was a 4 hour drive away on a good day.
Main street stores did not want to pay overtime so they closed at noon on Wednesday and were open 8 to noon on Saturday. A grocery open till 9 PM was unheard of. Parking was a pain. And many times you had to move the car if you had multiple stops not near each other.
Women could not work as a practical matter. Unless husbands worked a non traditional job schedule there was rarely enough time for him to do any shopping except for his direct needs.
I still remember when we got a KMart in my later teens. It was like Sears only cheaper stuff (in all meanings of cheaper). But you could go to Sears and KMart and a new longer hours supermarket and buy 95% of your weekly stuff in only 3 stops instead of 10 or 15.
But if there were a simple point-and-click mechanism for donating, say, 5 to 10 bucks - I'd gladly use it to send my regards to the author of one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read.
Ahem: FAQ: Why there is no tip jar on this blog.
It's hard to over-estimate the appeal of "convenience" to most people. It takes a lot to make the average MOP do something that increases the effort they have to put into a mundane task (especially when you can't immediately see the harm that the convenient approach may cause).
In the intro of my eBook I am putting a suggestion that if the reader is reading a pirated version, and they like it, to send me some money. I really don't care if a million people download it illegally and never read it or hate it. It's the ones who like it who ought to pay for it.
Stopping doing something stupid is really difficult for companies or organisations or governments, and only slightly less diffciult for individuals.
Because it usually entails admitting or having others point out you were wrong. People and organizations really don't like doing that.
Sorry about that - gang printing is a process where they are able to use the printer more efficiently. It's not something you can do if you are producing just the one title.
But large publishers have the advantage of that and a huge economy of scale when it comes to the printing process. As Charlie mentions, it's something fifty cents for a paperback, not hardcovers are actually not that much more expensive.
What most people (not you, probably, nor most readers here) don't realize is that what you are paying for with aa hardcover, really, is the ability to read it first.
Likewise, when you buy a book, the actual cost of the phyical object is probably the smallest percentage of the costs that go into producing it, so reducing the cost of a digital book by the same amount results in an ebook that basically costs the same.
The main cost for books, in terms of what you're paying, is almost always the general distribution costs, by which I mean the chunk the retailer and the distributor are taking. Ebooks may change that, either a little or a lot, depending.
"In the meantime, the temporary means I see for authors to reap some benefits from pirate populace is to include some tokens in their books allowing the "pirate" users to pay a small sum of money - at their own discretion - directly to the author. Something like the "donate" applets commonly used for apps in the android market, e.g. CoolReader's "bronze, silver, and gold" donation apps."
I set up a donate button, easily available and usable, for my (heavily pirated) comic book. I've gotten precisely zero donations.
So I am dubious about the value of this.
(I am not bothered by the piracy, mind - there's nothing I can do about it and I don't believe it affects my actual profits one way or another. I was just curious about whether this would work.)
If it costs 50p to print a book which sells in the shop for (say) £10 then the eBook should not sell for £9.50. It should sell for considerably less because that 50p is being marked up by each middleman by their percentage. Typically a bookshop would pay around £6 for the book, so at a minimum the bookshop should charge £9.16 without the printing contribution being added into the markup.
That's what they all dream about, of course. Get the next PTerry or JKR on the ground floor with a modest advance and a multi-book contract and the profit is enough to float a publishing house for a decade.
So their business model is almost identical to venture capitalists?
Thanks for the link, I see your logic. Though, I'd rather prefer ordering a bottle of scotch or whatever it is that you favor to be delivered at your doorstep, instead of having a part of my payment benefit the middlemen at the publishing house (and paying for shipping of a hardcopy book I don't need more than for the book itself). That's impossible, I guess, since you're unlikely to publish your home address for obvious reasons. I'll consider the FAQ-solution you linked, though.
@404 "I set up a donate button, easily available and usable, for my (heavily pirated) comic book. I've gotten precisely zero donations."
Yes, I remember similar experiment by a Russian sci-fi\fantasy author, with similar results. I didn't pay him for a single reason: it was inconvenient (going to a bank, filling in paper forms, paying commission). For some reason, I feel a compulsion to donate to Mr. Stross (it must be the exquisite quality of his works), so I'd even go for a wire transfer in his case. But at the same time, I have a strange aversion to sharing this money with publishers, don't know why.
The barriers to entry are larger than people think, not only do you have to build a decent website and supply contacts, you also have to make sure that enough people know of it and get to see how wonderful it is.
Amazon started with books. And a lot of people went there for the books. But I know many of them that buy almost anything there that doesn't require a touchy feel experience. Clothes (standard designs from the majors), electronics, linens, heck even toilet paper holders. www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002S0NP84/ref=oho01s00i00details
I was doing some searches for home gas fired furnaces as mine needs replacing and wanted to learn more about the various choices. Turns out you can buy them from Amazon. (Installation not included.)
So to compete with Amazon for "regular" folks books alone will not do it.
Dirk, you forgot VAT is chargeable on ebooks in the UK at 20%, while VAT on paper books is 0%. At least, in the UK. In other bits of the EU VAT on ebooks varies from 3% up to the regular full-fat rate -- iirc in France and Germany it's 4-5% rather than 20-23%.
The USA of course does not have quite the same problem here.
What's the approximate breakdown for a fiction book? Who gets what?
Who gets what?
Very roughly (the figures may vary a bit, depending):
10% of the cover price - materials and physical product and packaging.
10% - production costs (editing, typesetting, proofing, marketing)
10% - publisher's cut of the profits.
10% - author's cut of the profits.
30% - wholesaler
30% - retailer
OR
30% - Amazon.com
30% - discount AMZN passes on to public in order to draw them in
Note, however, that when Amazon offers a 30% discount to the public, they try to buy at a 70% discount off SRP, rather than a 50-60% discount (normal for most booksellers). And they're big enough they can often get it, which means a smaller slice of the pie for everyone else.
Since Amazon is both wholesaler and retailer it immediately grabs the 60%?
The problem surely is that the teenage whizzkid woudln't listen to them regarding the spec or what they wanted and wouldn't be able to communicate in much more than grunts. And wouldn't walk off the job halfway through complaining of being bored.
A single data-point on reader lock-in from a voracious reader: While I don't like DRM and would prefer that it go away, Lock-in isn't something I worry about the way I did for DRM'ed music. I simply don't often revisit fiction.
For when I do, or for non-fiction/reference works that I might read & use over the course of years, I recognize that my approach as a tech-savvy user is not available to all. (That approach being the one often decried as the reason for DRM in the first place-- teh piratical acts! Which I always find ironic, when I am driven to pirate something I legitimately own because of that object's attempt to limit piracy.)
I did something unusual. I had illegally downloaded Charlie's books. All of them. I read one and I liked it a lot. When I started another one and I was sure by that point that I like the stuff, I ordered 5 paperbacks from Amazon. Gave 2 of them as presents to people that might think of buying more if they like them. I did the same with Iain Banks. I don't have the slightest idea where all this stands at the ethical scale of things.
I stand corrected. It appears people are "claiming " they read more. However, sales of books have been declining, which does NOT seem to jive with this survey.
They immediately grab the 60%, and they try to grab even more if the publisher doesn't negotiate really hard.
I am going to try my usual attempt at rephrasing the issue from a different perspective. With over 400 comments here already, I am probably going to get lost in the noise. But I will at least have soothed my feelings.
First, Amazon also faces some systemic risks from the internet. The issue here is that books are "old fashioned media". Whatever they do, some of the roles that used to be served via book publishing will be instead served by internet distribution of content. Ebooks and ebook readers (and their associated contracts, which try to gain rights to the output of people capable of writing good ebooks) are an example of this issue.
Second there's another potential interesting tangent based lurking behind the "economics" curtain. The short form is that economists has a tradition of underestimating economic risks. A longer writeup at: http://triplehelixblog.com/2012/04/fractal-finance-a-rogue-mathematician%E2%80%99s-search-for-answers/
(I mostly mention the economic thing because of the "libertarian" mention in the article, but it has been impossible for me to get a libertarian advocate to give me any sort of rigorous mathematical treatment of the subject.)
So, anyways, one underlying issue here has to do with the nature of value (and risk) in the context of information and its presentation.
On an ethical scale, I'm cool with that. Not sure what my publishers would say officially but I suspect that unofficially individuals working there would be more or less cool with that.
"economists have" not "economists has" argh.... sobs
Not to mention s/w writing in the movies, where a teenage touch typist knocks out a few hundred lines of code a minute, while I spend a substantial portion of my time not typing at all.
Then there's always that one guy who breaks the averages. A friend who a software developer and know very well how hard it is to produce good code works with someone who is off the charts.
This guy is blind. But has an Eidetic memory. Over a years time will write on average about 1000 lines of code a day. And it is mostly error free.
But he is totally off the charts.
I find myself repeating the mantra "it's just make believe" every time a scene involving computers shows up in a movie
It was even better in the 70s when someone would break into a data center (at night when no one was around) and dump out the data set nicely formatted from data on 9 track tapes. All in about 10 minutes.
I'm not sure how unusual it actually is, especially if you replace "illegally downloaded" with "read for free", which encompasses a much wider range of activities - many of them entirely legal, but almost none of them involving payment to Charlie and his publishers. (The exception to the last part being "borrowed from a public library in a country with a PLR system".)
My experience is that people who enjoy things want to share them with others, and most people are basically honest (or at least recognise that if they don't pay for creative works they like, there might not be any more from that source). People reading a book from the library and then buying a copy for themselves - and one for a friend - isn't at all unheard of, at least in some circles.
Oh, I remember. My favourite one from contemporary movies is where the data center is located on the top floor of the high rise office block that also houses the HQ of the company. I just have to laugh.
@396:
[Like] ? [number of followers] ? [tipjar hits] ? [GBH threats per hour] ?
I don't remember Charlie putting much detail into that. It wouldn't be an easy system to design, because you'd be looking at multiple levels of metadata. Not just the ratings, but the people who make the ratings, and the ones who rate them, and little fleas to bite them, ad infinitum.
Remember, you'd have to figure out how to defend it all against people gaming the system, like the war between the search engines and the spam sites.
There was a considerably simpler system in Glasshouse, but that was more of a bludgeon than anything else.
The intent of a reputation system might be to establish a credibility rating for dealing with strangers, but in practice... consider, say, the Japanese Army schools of the 1920s and 1930s, or groups of fundamentalist Wahhabi, or neo-Nazi skinheads. There's a tendency of people online to cluster in little pockets where everyone things pretty much alike. When that happens, social pressures tend to urge conformity, often laced with extremism. No doubt Osama bin Laden's reputation rating would have been solid gold among his social group. Same with Jim Jones and his people in Jonestown, for that matter.
The cross breeze at that height keeps it cooler.
Isn't that assuming the hot air from senior management is being properly routed away from them? Whereas vents and ducts always seem to lead somewhere useful.
For a while - then the self-publishing overhead (because demand drives market drives innovation drives efficiency) becomes ever-smaller, so that self-publishing becomes the preferred way for not just a few, but most authors, at least for part of their product.
Amazon:
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2726167
"Now here's the problem: Amazon has a 2.58% (ttm) profit margin and a 3.14% operating margin. This is less than the benefit they get from evading the state sales tax system.
In short, this is a firm that only exists because of its ability to evade that tax structure. When, not if, that ends the company is a literal zero."
But don't mind him. Keep blowin' that doom horn an' humpin' that chicken!
The major book publishers should follow Baen Publishing's example. All their new books (and many of their older books) are available as ebooks as soon as the book is released. They are available in all major ebook formats, with no DRM. They sell new ebooks for $6.00 while some of their older books are only $4.00. Baen has been doing this for over a decade, and has been very successful.
Amazon Prime.
Especially as a big-ticket sales tax avoider scheme, but even with tax it's just darned convenient to get a pretty good price on a pretty large selection delivered to the home or office pretty quickly for free.
I just wish there was a Half-Price Books Prime (alas Amazon's equivalent just doesn't have the best prices, and for those that are close there's no Prime). $0.99 for a very-good condition hardcover, nearly $4 for shipping :p
I'm curious as to these ebook sales figures.
Does anybody have a breakdown of what titles or sorts of titles are actually selling as ebooks?
I have my suspicions, but would like to see some actual data.
Especially as a big-ticket sales tax avoider scheme,
In the US the federal tax law (for itemizers only?) allows you to put in your local sales tax rate and then take a deduction on how much you likely paid in sales tax. But I bet these formulas don't account for how much you avoided by using places like Amazon. And of course here in NC we have to pay an estimated amount that we bypassed by using internet purchasing. And I'm sure there's no correlation between these two numbers. Or at least any coordination at this time.
Oh, well.
Perhaps I missed it, but why is Baen not mentioned in this discussion. They manage to sell e-books in a range of formatting, Kindle compatible included. A good 25% of my books this year have been purchased from Baen's website. Perhaps I'm missing something, but they seem to be doing fine with the publishing changes. I've been buying twice as many Baen books since I've gotten my Kindle and I don't believe my experience is unique.
80% of everything is crap. Who do we want to help us filter this, so we can get the 20% that we want? The publishing houses did this for books - and did a job. A good job? A bad job? No way to know, since there isn't another model to compare it to. Now, like music, movies, TV, and software, this centuries-old business model is dying. What will replace it as a filter? How will we find that wonderful 20% of content that has meaning to us?
I don't know what will replace it, but I do know that between GoodReads, Amazon, Scalzi, Stephenson, and Glenn Reynolds, I haven't made a book purchase based on a books placement at a bookstore for over a decade. Heck, that is why I automatically buy anything with the words "Stross" on the cover. Reputation, recommendations, and trust will be the new currency. And the people who I trust will be my choice, not random people, randomly placed, in offices 1600 miles away.
I know it is scary. I am in the software industry. Putting stuff in the App Store, or out free as a demo, or getting a Kickstarter is very hard work. But the success is much sweeter, better distributed, and much more fair than it was back when we had to suck up to an Electronic Arts sales guy. And then watch EA keep all the money.
Authors, it's your turn.
ps. The DRM thing got figured out in music a while back. Just be patient.
Doing professional production can range from frighteningly difficult to downright easy, depending on the quality of the artist you're working with. Some can almost go from a live show to a professionally mixed CD, others require many hours of massaging. I remember once when I was involved with music doing audio on a show with two bands. One performance was letter-perfect, and could pretty much have been shot straight to CD without any problems.* The second band sounded like shit. Same audio engineer, same gear, same room.
The second band (run by a friend of mine) accused me of deliberately making them sound worse. I explained that this is what they sound like. This is exactly what they sound like. They didn't believe me. Since the one issue is so variable, I don't really claim to address it at all.
Mr. Stross trots out the usual monopoly argument: "big box store drives small stores out of business, then raises prices to screw the consumer". That would be a great argument if even one such real life example of this tragedy, could be produced; unfortunately, it can not. This hypothetical has never happened and never will. Most typically, antitrust enforcement is bad for consumers, as in the Alcoa antitrust settlement, where Alcoa was forced to permanently raise its prices; and while monpolies do exist, without exception they are government creations. Mr. Stross also rails against some libertarian "social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity". That too is fantasy, to the extent that it is not nonsense - what is "social justice"?
Getting back to books, with government getting involved, consumers can expect again to get screwed. In my ideal world, government would get out of the picture completely. We would get rid of all laws regarding DRM. Let the creators and consumers battle it out and find the balnce they want between "DRM so secure it's impossible for anyone to actually use" and no DRM at all. I suspect we'd already be a lot closer to the latter in a free market. I'll pass on buying anything of value with DRM because as technology marches on, inevitably everything DRM'd will become inaccessible, as either the hardware or software (or both) required to acces it, is obsoleted. Only the DMCA, another obscenity, allows content producers to foist DRM on consumers in the first place.
At the end of the day this just might be the way things are in the internet age. In this case maybe there will only be small boutique publishers who take on writers who make their name by themselves and then look for someone when successful. I don't know.
But when I look around I see eBay, Autodesk, Microsoft (PCs), Apple (computers for entertainment), Intuit, etc...
Intuit might be the best case to study in terms of Amazon.
Go back 10 to 15 years, Quickbooks was under $200 (I think) and payroll processing was about $100 a year for a small business. By 5 to 10 years ago QB had driven out most of the competition. Especially for vertical market software. Such software that used to cost $2000 to $5000 every year or few basically vanished. If you were an architect with under 100 employees software specific to your business vanished for all practical purposes. Enough people switched to QB that the market dried up. Now there are some products out there but, shall we say, things are different. Products are more expensive, complicated and require servers and annual maintenance contracts and not as well maintained as the cheaper stuff from years ago due to smaller markets.
Now many/most need the Premier edition of QB for $400 or so plus payroll is now just under $400 per year. With no competition they can now raise prices annually even if the "new" products don't offer much of anything new. And the payroll service is the heroin. Once you go onto it it is very painful to stop. And you can't use a version of QB more than 2 or 3 years old and still use the payroll service. And most accountants in the US REQUIRE you to give them a copy of your "Quickbooks" file or pay extra.
The question in my mind isn't will the marketplace for decent mid-tier books remain intact but will any of the mid sized stores/markets survive. Sporting goods, linens, heck even Target in the US.
Look at this: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/retail-in-2021-when-clicks-have-buried-bricks/19344
Company towns suck hard. Company towns with only the company store suck harder.
The anti-libertarian bigotry is unnecessary, as is the removal of DRM. All that's needed to break Amazon's "death grip" on the customer is for somebody else to come along who'll offer an equal or better deal, with equivalent customer service. It really is that simple. The "Agencies" don't give a rat's butt about the customer -- they're so far in reverse that their minions in agent-land still brag about how much they can sell a book for (and when's the last time THAT was a viable economic strategy?).
If it wasn't Amazon, it'd be somebody else, and "monopoly" is not the same as "currently winning in the market," a condition which will evaporate the nano-second Wal-Mart smells an opportunity to muscle in.
Gee, why exercise any critical intelligence? Why bother to acknowledge the immense variety of Mankind, even within ideological communities? Why not slander all of us because of the handful of cretins you know personally?
A friend has recommended your books to me. You just blew that recommendation out of the water, Charlie.
Not only is Baen successful within their niche, but Tor owns 33% of them, and Macmillan owns Tor, and Macmillan's board are intimately familiar with Baen's sales figures and profitability (being shareholders and distributors).
Now. Imagine you are the CEO of Macmillan. Can you come up with an argument for pivoting your business -- a multi-billion dollar corporation -- to follow the model of this particular n-levels-down partially independent subsidiary?
"They can list everything in print as if it's available, and order it only when they have a confirmed sale. Neat, huh?"
Er, no.
Interesting piece, but flawed premise -- this is not how Amazon actually works, as people like me who rely it for >50% of nongrocery purchases can attest. Almost everything I order from Amazon is shipped the same day and arrives in 1-2 days, which would be impossible if they had to order it. They actually tell you whether it's in stock when you order.
Give me the social-darwinists over the social-creationists (you know, the leftists who think they can "intelligently design" an economy) any day of the week. Libertarian ideas have made the world richer and freer.
Ah, the zestful joy of the libertarian war of all against all!
I just love idiot drive-bys.
Every creative process looks easier from the uninformed outside.
Charlie, any time you want to sing that song, I'll hum along.
I'm working on an online app that will allow people to research history and store the results online with granularity going down to the level of taking notes on an index card. The people I'm working with who don't program lose it when I come back a month later and say, "I've got comments working" (this is a side project, I also work 40-hours a week) and then they freak out about how I haven't implemented everything they were talking about in my limited free time.
I explain that they can "see the elephant," but actually creating an elephant requires implementing the elephant "one cell at a time." They never get it. It's always, "why are you creating cells? We wanted an elephant."
Drives me crazy, it does. Just makes me nuts.
Almost everything I order from Amazon is shipped the same day and arrives in 1-2 days, which would be impossible if they had to order it.
Are you sure it is not coming from a non Amazon warehouse? With Amazon just forwarding the order to another distributor or the manufacturer with a requirement they ship it with Amazon labels and paperwork?
David L.,
I can see how one might suspect that, but no, Amazon has to fulfill. The whole (and wholly awesome) premise of Prime is built around that. Amazon has gigantic warehouses for their own products, and they also fulfill for 3rd-party sellers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Amazon_Prime
They never get it. It's always, "why are you creating cells? We wanted an elephant."
But the real fun starts when they say "We've changed our minds. We really want a hippo. That won't be too hard will it. Just loose the tusks, make it a little shorter, and turn the trunk into a flat nose. Easy. Right? Oh yeah, we also have a client that really likes giraffes. Let's think about the simple mods to make the hippo into a giraffe for version 2. So what, this sets us back what, a week?"
Not sure I agree with any of this. How can Amazon be a monopolist when I can download books from ManyBooks and Baen to read on my kindle? If Amazon tries to profit from market share by jacking up book prices (and the evidence seems to be that it is trying to move the market in the opposite direction) what is stopping me from getting my books elsewhere? Right now I primarily buy books from Amazon because I like the convenience and price.
BTW, loved Saturn's Children.
I know they have a huge warehouse structure. But I also suspect they use drop shipping. Even for Prime customers.
If the Government's case is not defeated at trial and through all appeals, there will be a consent decree entered by the District Court, which will impose a de jure regulation via the District Court's jurisdiction, cf U.S. v. AT&T settlement; hencehe fox will be in the hen market house.
How can Amazon be a monopolist when I can download books from ManyBooks and Baen to read on my kindle?
Try downloading books from Amazon to read on your $THIRDPARTYMOBIPOCKET_READER. Then get back to me.
NB: Amazon sell 60% of all ebooks sold in the USA. Down from 85% before the big six shoved the agency model at then two years ago.
David L. -- No, they come from Amazon, they have an Amazon return address (unless of course they are not fulfilled by Amazon). Also, from my decades working in supply chain I can tell you the notion of managing a drop-ship network with thousands of manufacturers integrated in near real-time with Amazon's own systems is, let us say, very very impractical.
And that setup wouldn't work even if they could somehow manage the IT integration. After all, it's not like a mfr can just respond by turning on a magical make-anything machine with zero setup time and no fixed costs in order to produce the precise qty of what some Amazon customer ordered an hour ago; they have to work off of forecasts, which are planned over the weeks and months prior. All that stuff then has to be warehoused somewhere, so it makes far more sense for Amazon to just warehouse it themselves so they can fulfill, which is the side of the business they're good at.
Here's a nice overview of Amazon's fulfillment service: Amazon Fulfillment Services
"FBA listings are displayed with the "Fulfillment by Amazon" logo, so customers know that packing, delivery, customer service and returns are all handled by Amazon."
"Step 2: Amazon stores your products. Amazon catalogs and stores your products in our ready-to-ship inventory.
Amazon receives and scans your inventory. We record Item dimensions for storage. You monitor inventory using our integrated tracking system."I have to dispute the author's belief that Amazon's becoming a "monopoly" is bad for the consumer. A "monopoly" in a free market economy can only exist as long as the company with the "monopoly" provides the best service/product at the lowest cost - to the point that no one else can compete with them. If, as the author states, "[the company doesn't] have to give a shit about product quality or price..." then someone who does "give a shit" will come in and steal customers away from the "monopoly." That is why free enterprise works so well. A true monopoly can only exist if the government deems it to exist and provides a charter of monopoly to a corporation or individual. The Supreme Court decided in the 1824 decision, Gibbons vs. Ogden that the government did not have this right.
Dave L, it's actually even better than drop shipping to a degree. Amazon's 10K indicates that they average 74 days accounts payable. In non-accounting speak, that means they can acquire product for their huge warehouses and don't pay for it on avg for 74 days. That's more than 2x as long as any other major retailer.
No one knows better than AMZN how many per unit time something sells; so they can order just enough to guarantee they will sell the item before they have to pay for it. Indeed on average a given item in AMZN's warehouse sits there 30 days before shipping out.
So this is better than having drop shipping (paying for an item when you sell it) as AMZN gets paid a month before they have to pay for the item. Nice.
Also, AMZN does not offer Prime on everything. It varies. Some items you buy apply but many don't. For the long long tail stuff, they can elect not to offer the two-day shipping option but nevertheless present it on the Store as available to order and in inventory as long as at least one warehouse has it. If you live close enough to where it happens to be, you get a Prime offer.
There is a recurring lie that Libertarians do not have a country. However that overlooks the vast territory they in fact DO have, you are using it right now. Yes, the Libertarian Utopia is indeed the Internet itself. Think about it, then get back to me. :)
Please do not play an economist without a degree. Your facts are a bit wrong; your understanding of them as well.
If you want to argue your version of economic theory, please do it somewhere else; I recommend Paul Krugman's blog.
Steam, for me, is the best option because of their incredible sales. I have a library of over 300 games for the computer. All legal. All accessible across all of my computers.
Gamestop, Best Buy, etc. They just can't or won't lower their prices to what consumers (at least this one) consider to be reasonable for digital distribution. Amazon's downloadable PC games are starting to dig into this, I've been buying a few from them at better prices than Steam.
I don't know enough of this argument, but I love Amazon. Their digital book prices are still absurdly over-priced IMO, but they're incredibly convenient. And I've managed to obtain a much larger library than I would have been able to otherwise, including all of Mr. Stross' books.
I'm not quite sure what the kerfluffle is all about. Apple scares me far more than Amazon. Heck, Amazon has the foresight to send a thank you card for being a loyal customer. They respond to customers, etc. What company does that these days?
The internet is a libertarian utopia?
Tell that to this guy. Or this one. Or this one.
Don Pettengill @ 437 and while monpolies do exist, without exception they are government creations. Assuminmg you are a USSAian ... never heard of the Seven Sisters? (Oil monopoly cartel) Don't even know your OWN history! what is "social justice"? NOT shitting on peole, just because you can, for a start. Being fair and honest. Or don't you subscribe to those values?
DRM was and is a product of those wonderful non-guvmint private companies you appear to lurve... erm.
Francis Porretto @ 440 BEcause these supposed libertarians really don't seem to care about other people, and repeat the mantra that guvmint is bad (except for the miltary of course ... which does make one wonder.
David L @ 447 You JUST DESCRIBED defence procurement!
Generally I suggest some people need to read G. B. Shaw's play "The Apple Cart", where noting new or improved got made, because of "Breakages Limited" - who simply bought up improvements and shut them down. And it does happen
Anyone else beginning to suspect that a link to this blog has been posted somewhere with a bit of a high libertarian demographic in its usual readership?
Just possibly.
The moderators have been given a heads-up. I'm off to the pub.
Enjoy the pub! (Envious parental unit here...)
Greg -- The Seven Sisters (see Wikipedia) cartel was formed by gov't action, initiated by the U.S. State Dept. Since then, OPEC (an open gov't conspiracy to set oil prices) and state-owned companies have waxed while the 7S have waned.
DRM was enabled largely by the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (see Wiki) which made circumventing DRM illegal, and has been opposed by CATO and other libertarians.
It's a mistake to confuse libertarianism with support for corporatism. The first instinct of any successful business is to use gov't to extract economic rents -- it's very often the best investment.
ecause in my experience they tend to be found in conjunction with a social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity.
... neatly referring to just about every stereotype there is about libertarians.
NOT shitting on people, just because you can, for a start. Being fair and honest.
Yup. These.
Thinking there is more to human life than the accumulation of material goods. Funny thing, I keep reading libertarians online saying that it's all about Freedom but it always seem to come down to the Freedom to keep more of "their" money and sometimes the freedom to smoke dope etc...
There is not one example of a libertarian society which can be said to have worked. Like 'perfect' communism, it just doesn't exist (I might defer to an earlier poster that actually communism does work in small family units, but not libertarian ones.)
Anyway, it's always fun to read the comments.
Alex R, if ever you get your online history app to a beta test stage, and need any beta tester historians, feel free to give me a shout. I work with coders on a regular basis and know what to expect.
I also find that history project very interesting indeed. Good luck and hope it comes to something.
Polls show most people want a real libertarian government. They don't want others messing with them. The Libertarians we have want to mess with people without that evil government stopping them. The libertarian party is funded by the same people who fund the far right. Its someplace to go after you are feed up with the GOP. Someplace harmless. They have no use for the commie pink Libertarians who don't want to mess with anybody. In the real world I don't think it would work for long.
Dave L, it's actually even better than drop shipping to a degree. Amazon's 10K indicates that they average 74 days accounts payable.
Well that makes more sense. If you get to keep it for 2 1/2 months before paying for it then warehousing any and everything becomes feasible.
Anyone else beginning to suspect that a link to this blog has been posted somewhere with a bit of a high libertarian demographic in its usual readership?
ZDNet
Way over the top geek crowd. Sheldon lives there.
What is this odd thing about bagging on libertarians?
We want to be left alone, our rights respected and yours as well. The golden rule, etc. Worship who you want how you want as long as you don't blow up people in the process. Marry and love who you want. Trade with, ingest, and use whatever you want. It's your life and your body.
This is obviously an evil philosophy and must be crushed. Like Christians who are coming to your town to do good works. Evil fundies. Feeding the poor and all.
Advocating a small, responsible, and ultimately accountable and efficient government, social programs dealt with by society, not some central governmental strongman. High speed, low drag. This is obviously stunning people into abject terror.
Jeez, Mr. Stross. Between reading your moderation policy and "Halting State" you seem to have one hell of a hard-on of... well hatred may be too strong a word, but contempt seems adequate, for US folks.
Idiot drive bys? How about completely misunderstanding a political ideaology? That's not too impressive an accomplishment either.
Toodles, Happypants. Look forward to your next rant about American psychos in book form.
@Scott
The thing is, libertarians really don't just want to be left alone. You want to impose a libertarian society on us even though the overwhelming majority has made it abundantly clear that they have absolutely no desire for such a change.
If you want to go off on your own and build a libertarian country, go with our blessing. But leave us in peace. If you want to stay, accept that we do not want a libertarian society and let the matter drop.
You can't stay and agitate for an anti-democratic imposition of your values and (with a straight face) claim that you respect our rights.
We want to be left alone, our rights respected and yours as well. The golden rule, etc. Worship who you want how you want as long as you don't blow up people in the process. Marry and love who you want. Trade with, ingest, and use whatever you want. It's your life and your body.
Except that isn't the whole story is it.
That's the warm and fluffy bits of libertarian theory that's hard to disagree with it. The problem is all the stuff in the "It's your life and body" rider you put on there.
It is. But it's also my life and body and I have to share the same geography as you do and life is just a tad more complicated these days than being left alone.
I should be free to ingest whatever I want. But I shouldn't be free to go for a drive afterwards in a tonne of steel with a motor.
You might not want to pay to do something about starving people in the street, or happy to let sick people without insurance die, but you have to live in places where, generally, most humans don't like seeing that or where most humans realise if you leave an underclass lying around with no hope, you have a fairly negative net effect on everybody elses standard of living.
In short. I'm happy for you to be left alone, as long as you keep off my lawn, and by my lawn I mean the country I have to share with you and the services which we all have to share... like roads that don't have holes, bridges that don't fall down, police and fire services that work for everybody, universal standards of healthcare provision, education services to make sure we have a well educated and competent population, and the opportunity for the market place to actually work without devolving in the monopolies, that contrary to the rhetoric around here, do happen all the time.
Libertarian philosophy is OFF TOPIC.
There's a lot of comments, so please scroll back to the top and read what the topic is before you decide to comment, please.
Just what about the internet makes you think it's free from government control and economic regulation and what exactly makes you think that would necessarily be a good thing? As shitty as governments can be more often than not I'd rather take my chances with a democratically elected government than a corporation.
In libertarian-world, it apparently doesn't happen because, um, magic.
You are confusing libertarianism with anarchism. In libertarian-world, there is still law enforcement.
Veering back on topic, I should add, Amazon does of course practice consignment (meaning an item isn't on their books except at the moment of sale) but of course consignment inventory has been around for centuries, if not millennia.
I think Amazon's major advantages are the following:
1 - Warehouses are cheaper than retail space -- this is the main reason bookstores are going under. Since there is practically zero value-added to having physical access to the books (unlike, for instance, furniture), book customers have flocked to Amazon.
2 - Virtualization -- there are (iirc) something on the order of millions of published books; being able to search a user-friendly database for, say, a copy of Zelazny's classic "Jack of Shadows" is hugely advantageous over trying to find it in a retail space, even asuming there was one near you and it could be large enough to have everything you wanted. And this naturally extends to other things as well -- compare wandering through a Home Depot to searching Amazon (which will often have better selection anyway).
3 - Reviews! Being able to see feedback is huge. Buying something without reviews now seems practically Neolithic.
4 - Revenue over profit -- Bezos cares far more about revenue than profit, to a nearly absurd degree, which has led to some interesting business choices, and I think that's something people who believe in compassion, charity, and social justice (and more generally the betterment of the poor) should particularly love him for -- it's a major reason why the Kindle and Kindle Fire are so accessible to people of modest incomes.
Thanks Charlie, I'll contact Transreal.
Trying to be on topic. The problem with somebody competing with Amazon in this space is they have the advantage of having been able to pump billions of dollars into infrastructure at a time when the money was extraordinarily easy and, relatively speaking, cheap to raise.
They have the warehouses, the supplier systems, the distribution set up, all with extremely good grandfathered in terms - not to mention, they are trying to tie up a huge piece of the supporting infrastructure with technology like AWS, EC2, Kindles and the like.
I quite like the current publishing paradigm over the App Store approach to it, purely because there is a degree of content control, albeit, one I don't always disagree with. I think Charlie is quite right that going over to the lowest common denominator of anybody can publish, anything for the 30% Amazon (or Apple) tax will mean an explosion in content, but a dramatic reduction in the general quality and make it that much harder to identify good content over poor.
You just have to look at the ridiculous sums of money currently being invested into Application Store review and prioritisation technologies to see that this is already seen as a huge problem in the app market.
The thing is, we might already be too far along the curve to pull out of it, and having single companies with their hands on the control of creation, supply, distribution and deliver should, really, scare the hell out of anybody who thinks about it for more than a few seconds.
Amazon is a great example of how markets can produce unexpectedly superior outcomes. I think if you told people in 1990 what Amazon did today, most business executives would have said it was impossible, if not ridiculous.
You might not want to pay to do something about starving people in the street, or happy to let sick people without insurance die, but you have to live in places where, generally, most humans don't like seeing that
And those people should be completely free to do whatever they like about that, as long as it doesn't involve taking my property from me by force.
Interestingly, Nobel nominee Rudy Rummel has shown that every single famine of the last 100 years has been caused by gov't action, often quite deliberately, and you are also roughly 10x more likely to be denied treatment by rationing than by lack of ability to pay (this is why the U.S. does 2x as many MRIs and organ transplants as the OECD average, as well as having the highest cancer survival rates). The evidence suggests the best way to not have people dying in the streets or denied medical treatment is to keep coercion out of it.
[ Moderator's note: You have been warned twice. This is your yellow card. ]
And those people should be completely free to do whatever they like about that, as long as it doesn't involve taking my property from me by force.
So you'd rather set up systems where by that's the most likely outcome?
Shakes head in bewilderment.
I'll ignore the old canards and fake stats about healthcare because my side has them too... and MRI machines do not healthcare make.
Interestingly, Nobel nominee Rudy Rummel...
I think that Nobel WINNER Paul Krugman is a more interesting reference source on matters economical myself. Especially relating to healthcare and monopolies and the like.
Interestingly, Nobel nominee Rudy Rummel...
Hmmm... sorry to do 3 posts but I came across this note somewhere online in a bio for Rudy Rummel:
"Rummel used to publicly claim that he was a finalist for the Nobel Prize for Peace, based on an AP report, reprinted in his local paper, about an alleged Nobel short list of 117 names. He has retracted the claim,"
The point of it is that it's not as bad for the consumer as "monopoly" suggests because Amazon won't be able to get that bad.
Scott @ 472 Except many USian so-called "Libertarians" seem to be interested in what people do in bed, and which BigSkyFairy they worship. Which means they are not "real" libertarians, they are theocrats. Which is why we are very suspicious, of all of them.
I just wanted to address this quickly because it seems to be awfully off the mark as to what I subscribe to.
Except it is the whole thing.
I have no problem with government and shared benefits of fire departments, police etc.
Libertarianism to me is all about humanism. It's not exclusive. It's inclusive.
There are many who give it a bad name, and they're posuers, or hybrids. Many people, many beliefs.
I'm not sure how my insisting on governments respecting my civil rights and staying out of people's personal lives is somehow going against the will of democracy. We're a republic anyway.
The Tea Party demonstrations are pretty good proof that the theme is more widely resonated than thought previously.
So please, don't ascribe silly notions to what I believe, and I'll do my best not to eviserate the idea of communism just not having been tried properly yet. (He said with dripping contempt.)
I have nothing else to add, so please go back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Nobody's seriously discussed a novel's graphical metadata yet.
Back in the days when books were all printed on paper this was called a book cover.
In order to get a good book cover you needed a good artistic director (usually working on salary for a publisher but not always) and a good cover artist (usually freelance but not always) with a good relationship going on between each other and with higher-ups. And yeah the artistic director actually read the book.
When innocents saw the price for the cover they would yelp at the idea of putting up so much money "just for a drawing", not knowing that there were long years of study and experience behind the price and ignoring the fact that this was a really tiny part of the production costs.
Mostly, though, those innocents ignored the even more important fact that the majority of readers were very much influenced / helped by visual cues, despite their love for reading books in text-only form. Visual cues, book covers, the graphical metadata of any publication was unimportant only for a minority of the book-buying human race. A minority very often made up of computer programmers, musicians, and other non-visual types, by the way.
These days I see some self-publishing authors who pooh-pooh the importance of graphical metadata and actually boast of how they make up a cover for their book after only two or four hours on photoshop. I think that if they are outstanding off-the-chart geniuses with a rare unofficial drawing experience, a rare self taught culture in the graphic arts and publishing history,then it might work. Yes, they might just be able to make usable covers for their books this way. Otherwise, their covers are useless and a lot of people, a great many people, will skip over their books in the graphical browsing environment provided by online book sellers.
But the most amusing (or depressing, depending on my mood that day) self-published authors are the ones who actually take the trouble to seek out a good freelance artist and commission him (or her) to draw something for their cover and/or graphical metadata identifier. They fail miserably, because they're not pro art directors. Sure, the drawing is nice (and even beautiful, sometimes)and it's more or less related to what's inside the book. But it's not useful as a way to make their work stand out in a Web-based graphical browsing environment.
It gets even worse.
In so many genres, so many fields the way that you can spot a rotten self-published novel, a rotten book put out by a vanity press , is by just taking a glance at its cover. You have a field of a hundred or so book thumbnails on your screen and immediately you see sticking out the ones that are worthless hack jobs or the unpalatable fruit of innocents.
So, that's why I think eBook self-publishing is a bad idea,unless you're willing to actually recreate all, and I mean all of the skill sets that a good traditional publisher (there are rotten ones) offers to authors, including the too often underrated and underestimated art of covers and/or graphical metadata.
How does this relate to Amazon's current policies for eBooks?
With their latest self-publishing programs they're shoving the slushpile right in front of readers. The readers (or The Market if you buy into their philosophy) are supposed to decide by themselves which self-published books are gems and which ones are spamclumps. Decide by reading recommendations? Most recommendations are a bad joke. As in any other browsing phenomenon the first level of filtering is going to be by visual clues. Your book cover / graphical metadata looks amateurish? Fail!
According to Wikipedia (I know, but it's easy) your Rudy Rummel "used to publicly claim that he was a finalist for the Nobel Prize for Peace, based on an AP report, reprinted in his local paper, about an alleged Nobel short list of 117 names. He has retracted the claim, although it still appeared in one of his books."
According to the same source, he supports the Iraq War, but thinks that global warming is a scam. Hmmmm....
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NH.HTM
The Nobel claim's there. Read the web page, decide for yourself. I'll go for "almost as amusing as L. Ron Hubbard"
I just wanted to address this quickly
because of the multiple warnings about discussing libertarianism?
Please stop. It's not on-topic to say why you like it, it's not on-topic to say why you hate it; it's not on-topic to discuss who supports it or why. No matter what your position is, you are not going to convince anyone of anything, other than that you are wrong, prompting them to respond and point out. And that got old decades ago.
Also, once again, since people seem to keep missing it: this blog is not in the USA. It is not even in the Americas.
My "physical book" filtering mechanism includes reading the first page of a book. Dead giveaway for me is names; slightly too many apostrophes, or overuse of the letters "z", "q", and "x"... are a sign that the author is trying a bit too hard to be "different".
Mr Rummel's book cover art (see link in #489) fails your filter, of course 8-)
Oh, c'mon, Charlie, you can type 40wpm, you should be able to crank out that novel in a week. (Kerouac actually could have done it in 1/3 that time at 120wpm, but he'd have had to spend the rest of the week scoring more amphetamines.)
I'm really surprised that your senior editor farms out the actual editing to your agent as opposed to somebody from her publishing house - I thought that was the part they wanted the most control over. Is this a publisher you've been with for a long time, or somebody you started working with after you had a reputation?
Will@435 - The publishing houses did this for books - and did a job. A good job? A bad job? No way to know, since there isn't another model to compare it to. Actually there is - go ask editors you know about the stuff that's in their slushpile. Or buy some random samples of 99-cent self-published ebooks on Amazon. And one model you can compare it with is Amazon's recommendation and reviewing system, which has been evolving for a decade or two (including evolved "features" like reviewers who'll happily give anything a positive review in return for your positive review of their book.)
Charlie,
Small thought occurs. You say if you personally had to do everything associated with eBook publishing, you'd only write half as many books? But you receive 10% of the cover price.
In purely monetary terms, wouldn't you be up on the deal?
And assuming you wanted to push the work off onto others, couldn't you arrange the division of labour such that you did 1 manyear of writing, and ANOthers did 1 manyear of other tasks? 50%:50% split.
Either there is 10x as much effort/resources needed to get a book into someone's hands as it takes to write it (in which case the workflow is ripe for improvement), or you get screwed over with only 10% of the cover price...
iTunes had DRM when it started. Everyone cried about how this meant that Apple was taking over the digital-music market, about vendor lock-in, about how they could "turn off your music", about monopoly, about monopsony.
Five years later and nobody gives two shits about whether iTunes files have DRM or not, which they generally don't.
Ian: there's a couple of questions you need to ask yourself.
Imagine, if you will, you are interested in developing the great new app for iPhone - the barrier to entry is low - $99 for the iTunes App Store, free for Android... you can code, but you need a graphic designer and somebody who knows some PR and maybe some other people.
Now, off you go and find some people to do that on a revenue share... it will be a lot harder than you think, unless you're in a position to pay upfront.
Moving this to publishing. The assumptions needed to be made, so that Charlie would be 'up on the deal' would include the costs for: graphic designers, editors, somebody to handle his PR related activities and somebody to look after other stuff AND the interest payments to cover the cost of paying them and yourselves some money while you're writing.
All of this assumes that your actual 'sales' won't go down when you do this so there is more of a pie to go around.
There is a reason why recruitment consultants stay in business despite being seen as parasites by most of the people who use them.
I love the fact that someone's brought up the pernicious effects caused by a monopsony. FYI, the biggest monopsony coming is the single payor healthcare system that is the holy trail for the progressive left.
They don't care because people did complain... and because the record labels got scared enough of Apple to give a better deal to Amazon (lower prices, and no DRM). Which is a bit ironic.
You're not being subtle, and your attempts at discussing politics are not appreciated. See earlier warnings.
This is an interesting subject with only one thing certain about it - nobody knows what is going to happen. However, there are things that are either certain, or very probable.
E-readers are going to get a lot cheaper. The Nook is $100 now. No idea if that's subsidised by B&N, or marked up to make money - but there's no doubt, it will get cheaper.
There will be cheap, high quality ereaders that will only read open formats. It's interesting that the computer field has oscillated between general purpose computers and devices intended to fulfill single roles - which then acquire additional functionality. The mobile telephone becomes a portable computer, with a vast range of programs able to run on it. Will the ereader become a multi-function device, or will it stick to doing one thing well? The devices will be computers, so either is possible. It's also possible that tablets will become the device of choice for reading ebooks.
The share of the market for print books will continue to decline - until at some point, some kind of equilibrium is reached. Hardback books persisted even when a cheaper, more convenient alternative existed - there will continue to be a market for print, but we don't know how big it will be. It may turn out to be negligible, or substantial.
Amazon have been the big success in e-retailing, but they aren't impregnable. Apple have become very successful selling digital content - mostly music. They have a very restrictive model for this, using iTunes and the iPlayer. However, it seems to be holding up so far. Other companies that have tried online retailing have failed in a big way, so it's obviously harder than it looks.
Amazon are able to market a vast range of material due to the tiny marginal costs. Having a long tail doesn't impact them negatively, because any sale is profit.
The problem that publishers have is that they are many competing businesses, and Amazon and Apple are single entities. However, their interest is clearly in avoiding being entirely dependent on Amazon, much as the suppliers are at the beck and call of Tesco. Can they do this? Ultimately, it comes down to where customers will prefer to shop. If people persist in using Amazon to buy books, Amazon will own the market. If some alternative becomes popular, the balance will shift.
Rummel seems to have a blind spot for famines caused by warring warlords. And a carefully crafted definition of democracy that seems to have been retroactively designed to exclude those democracies, as most of us would define them, that fight inconvenient (for him) wars with other democracies.
Am I supposed to daunted by your reputation or something because your argument method is quite unimpressive. Tell me from your vast knowledge how someone stays ahead of the competition when they offer bad service and bad products at lousy prices. Lets assume that everyone is operating within the law.
Tell me from your vast knowledge how someone stays ahead of the competition when they offer bad service and bad products at lousy prices. Lets assume that everyone is operating within the law.
The opportunity cost associated with changing to a competitor is either very hard, or you're otherwise locked in.
I have exactly three options for broadband internet where I live. They're all expensive, and they're all pretty poor and they all seem to have pretty lousy customer service.
I have exactly one option for my electricity, my gas and my water/sewerage services.
While there are LOTS of options for my bank, it's such a right royal pain in the arse to change bank that I've only done it once in the last 25 years.
In other words, there are LOTS of perfectly legal examples.
I've already bought enough stuff on my Kindle that I'm unlikely to move to a Nook...
E-readers are going to get a lot cheaper. The Nook is $100 now. No idea if that's subsidised by B&N, or marked up to make money - but there's no doubt, it will get cheaper.
There will be cheap, high quality ereaders that will only read open formats.
They ARE subsidized at $100.
What magic fairy dust is going to make ereaders NOT tied to an ecosystem cheaper as they will not have subsidies?
Here's what I don't understand. Your entire post seems to be written from the point of view that publishers are suppliers. As an author yourself, you should understand better than anyone that in the book business, publishers are intermediaries; the suppliers are the individual authors.
In traditional (paper) publishing, the publishing companies were a necessary supplier for most authors, because they didn't own their own printing press, warehouses, etc. But in the world of ebooks, publishers are far from a necessary intermediary. As someone has already pointed out, the costs of setting up your own website and distributing your books yourself is trivial. Yes, you'd have to do your own marketing and that would cut into writing time, but you'd then get to keep 100% of the profits. Or you could let Amazon do it for you and keep 70% of the gross. (Not the net profits, the gross sales.)
But what about the problem of Amazon becoming a monopsony and putting the squeeze on the authors, the real ebook suppliers? Well, as Dave Freer points out, they'd have to go a long way before the deal they were offering became worse than the deal traditional publishers are offering authors now. Key paragraph from Freer's article: "Let’s play through from a minor author’s point of view these terrible fates. Let’s start with the squeeze… quite plausible. At the moment they’re paying 70% of gross. Publishers are paying… 25% of Net. Or, to take the deceptive terms out and allow comparison of frink-fruit with frink-fruit, a gross (after agent’s commission) of somewhere around 14.5%… That’s a LOT of squeeze before it gets that low. And a lot of gap for competitors."
So am I worried about Amazon becoming a monopsony in the ebook market? Not in the least. As long as they offer authors the choice of whether to put DRM on their ebooks or not, customers won't be exclusively tied to the Kindle platform, and so authors will be able to sell directly to customers if they decide Amazon's deals are getting too bad. If Amazon ever started telling authors "If you e-publish with us, you must use our DRM or no deal" then they could pull off a monopsony -- but only among the authors who settled for Amazon's terms instead of setting up their own bookstore (or going with Fictionwise, ebooks.com, etc. -- all Amazon competitors in the ebook market).
In other words, the inherent low barriers to market entry in the ebook market make a monopsony inherently impossible. The only people who stand to lose if Amazon wins are the old intermediaries, the traditional publishers. And if (as I hear from many authors these days) the traditional publishers are really paying their own suppliers (the authors) only 25% of net profits, then it's the publishers who were the real monopsonists, and I say good riddance to them -- their fall can't come soon enough.
I am neither arguing nor debating with you. If you want to go have a fight about economic theory and fact, please do it elsewhere.
As a reminder, please go read the moderation policy.
Charlie, in a word yes. The parties mentioned committed crimes in their native lands, they should have stayed completely virtual. They could have done precisely the same kinds of things (sans Dotcom, who couldn't have made real millions) if they had been virtual citizens of a virtual paradise. Given the largely rough and tumble nature of the Internet itself, it is still largely self-policing with opprobrium being the main curtailing force. Your comment blog is a great example of this. Admittedly you need to keep out trolls, but many of them are just bots and agents (same for spammers). Over time, the sites themselves will be intelligent enough (with their own agents) to resolve for this.
Libertarian philosophy isn't always about wealth creation although admittedly it has been bannered about by those who have achieved wealth by other means and feel that Libertarian ideals are the most likely way for others (or themselves if they were young again) to achieve success (again). Conversely as the funnel narrows due to ever more egregious statism, the likelihood of newcomers entering the "fold" of the wealthy will be equivalent to the camel and the eye of a needle metaphorically speaking. :)
Under the circumstances, I think that what Scalzi calls the Loving Mallet of Correction needs to get deployed now, Sean.
I am normally up for a completely off topic "Libertarianism - l or L, Threat or Menace?" (as a little-l libertarian, myself) but it's been one of those weeks, North Korea and Iran are both up to no good, and Charlie's already unhappy. Mallet away...
Incidentally, nothing I just wrote should be read as dismissing the possibility of Amazon becoming a monopsonist in the physical goods market (whether those goods are books, clothing, or anything else Amazon sells), where the cost barriers to entry are much higher. There, Amazon could easily pull off a monopsony if they become the sole buyer for their suppliers. But in the ebook market, the inherent structure of the market makes that impossible in the absence of ubiquitous DRM. (Yet another reason why the traditional publishers' insistence on DRM is short-term thinking, that's going to end up costing them big in the long term.)
"Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror. We saw, as I have said, certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead; and I may add that our nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously by a very curious intensification of the strange prevailing fetor, now quite plainly mixed with the nameless stench of those others which had gone before. The light of the second torch left no doubt of what the obstructions were, and we dared approach them only because we could see, even from a distance, that they were quite as past all harming power as had been the six similar specimens unearthed from the bookstores we had previously examined.
"They were, indeed, as lacking - in completeness as most of those we had unearthed - though it grew plain from the thick black pool gathering around them that their incompleteness was of infinitely greater recency. There seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake’s bulletins would have suggested no less than eight as forming the monopsony which had preceded us. To find them in this state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what sort of monstrous struggle had occurred down here in the dark of capitalism.
"Authors, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their pens, and our ears now made certain the existence of a writers' retreat far beyond. Had those others disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit? The obstructions did not suggest it, for goose quills against the tough tissues of the online publishers could hardly account for the terrible damage our approaching glance was beginning to make out. Besides, the huge writers we had seen appeared to be singularly peaceful. "
--H.P. Lovecraft, The Kindles of Madness
Daveon,
I'm aware of all those things, and more - I'm not exactly new to looking a business model/process shapes. The point being made is a sanity check on the assumptions. Things don't tie up, and thus something is wrong, somewhere.
Particular in a time when the whole industry is in the midst of a revolutionary change, now is the time to understand how you reengineer the workflow model to your advantage (which is what Amazon are trying to do). Holding on too tight to assumptions that how things were done in the past, therefore that's how they will operate in the future, is a critical mistake you can make. As is letting things happen to you - as I said above, sheep get eaten.
We know that the warehousing/distribution/selling aspects are significantly changed by eBooks - indeed collapsed would be the right word. Since they take a large pie piece of the gross, it's sensible to consider if they can be done differently such that volumes are either only slightly affected, or increase - whilst costs are slashed. I think that is true. I also think the value of certain other elements is not reflected in the price/volume equation and can be adjusted. I think the net effect is that incomes for authors could rise significantly, if they were prepared to act strategically and en masse.
Great news. Amazon are looking for warehouses in Australia to open an Australian Branch. This will smash open the protected Asia Pacific book market. When I wrote to them a while back complaining about restrictions for Australian book buyers, they actually replied and said the publishing cartel were to blame, and that I should be patient as they were working on the problem.
As a graphic designer I can tell you that finding someone to work on spec isn't that difficult. When your young and someone has the next "insert giant cash cow here" killer that they are offering you a tiny slice of it's hard to say no. Especially when your not in an industry known for huge financial rewards.
I had a professor try to beat it into our heads that the cardinal rule is to always get paid.
Someones offering you a percentage? Get the money up front. Someones offering you a royalty? Get The Money Up Front! Someones offering you a...GET THE MONEY UP FRONT!
I thought it was a funny lesson at the time....I'd tell you how many companies I ended up with a single digit % stake in but that's going to be the topic of my self published novel.
It's going to be horribly written, but the cover will be nice.
Ian: I'm pretty sure that Charlie has pointed out that costs of production and distribution of the physical entity are a relatively small part of the total, hence e-books not actually being a lot less to produce than the printed article.
That leaves the rest of the business related puzzle, and I think that's probably a more significant amount that you're allowing for it. It is in the App business, which is the business I see most frequently used as the direction some people would like to see publishing going in.
Financing (advances etc...), marketing, editing, art, promotion and PR are all parts of the puzzle - and if an author suddenly finds he owns all of them, to be paid for out of his 70% - I'd not be in the least bit surprised to find that he ends up back at 10%, with a LOT more work to do that has nothing to do with writing.
Really? Because as a person who pays for graphic design, I've struggled to find anybody willing to take stock in exchange for design work.
Barter, yes, stock, no thanks, cash please.
Frankly it's been driving me nuts for a couple of years now.
Hi,
I worked for AMZN from Nov 98 to Mar 03, in Seattle. I was aware of most major policies at that time, especially until 2001.
You say: "obscure items would be listed as available but only ordered from the supplier when a customer requested one."
AFAIK, this statement is erroneous. Items marked as available were in distribution centers. It's possible that this included the inventory inside Ingram when Ingram was doing drop shipping for AMZN, but that's it (it didn't last long - Bezos realized he was teaching a competitor how to perform a core part of AMZN's strategy).
What's true is that AMZN could hold a single copy and list it as available throughout the country, whereas B&N could only compete by having the item in several stores.
What's also true is that AMZN turns its inventory much faster than even the most efficient bookstore chain. Therefore, on a majority of its sales it gets paid by its customers before the time it needs to pay its suppliers (by law, the terms are roughly the same through the industry in the US). That's the source of its cash efficiency.
As a side note, WRT book pricing, I wonder what you think of the French Lang Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law
Cheers,
JD
Daveon,
Suggest you look upthread (@411) where Charlie himself points out that roughly 60% goes to wholesale and retail.
60% is a sizeable chunk in anybody's terms, particularly when eBooks disrupt/collapse that segment particularly.
In general, you have to access what the value added of each stage is, in the new world.
Take, for example, cover design. If you took a simple, low cost approach, to producing a JPG vs a professionally produced cover design, what does that mean in the eBook world? Cost vs value - its not rocket science, but I'm betting that you don't have to climb too far up the quality scale before you reach negative marginal returns when what you are talking is eBooks.
I can only speak for myself and the others in the field I know but every time I've taken stock it's been for one of four reasons. It was a friends business. If I had the time for a long shot. If it was a product I was interested in or I truly thought the product or business had incredible potential.
Now most of these things happened early in my career and today no single one of those is enough. For instance I'll end up illustrating a friends cover for his e-book when I have time for a sliver of the profits. Odds of making anything? Negligible. But I enjoy illustration work and don't get alot of it in my normal freelancing.
Would I take on designing an app on a revenue share? It would have to be a VERY interesting idea. Would someone fresh out of school want to? Much more likely.....but then, you get what you pay for.
Now to bring this slightly back on topic. How long till Amazons publishing back-end scans your uploaded manuscript, then goes out to one of the stock image houses and pulls up an image you can use for you cover design (which they can slice a few points off of for themselves)?
Okay, I haven't conducted a market study or anything, but I besides my kindle (which I love) I got a phone from Verizon on which I can read all my Amazon books. I say again, what is the big deal?
Ian Smith@516 - The difference between a typical self-publisher's cover and a professional cover isn't an issue of hi-res four-color-separated printable image vs. JPG, it's an issue of quality of artwork not only as art but as a marketing tool that will attract readers. The attractiveness is somewhat different for ebooks vs. paper, and I've heard any number of authors rant about the relationship of the artwork to the actual story in the book [#insert filk song about "There's a bimbo on the cover of my book"], and UK authors especially rant about the US covers that US publishers decide will sell, but it really does affect sales.
Charlie gave 10% as physical production cost, 30% as wholesale, and 30% as retail, but with physical-space books, the wholesale cost is mostly related to the fact that books are physical inventory that needs warehouses, physical distribution, cost of money for inventory, and risk of sales timing, and partly related to the cost of selling to retailers. That really does disappear with ebooks, and IMHO it's not appropriate for Amazon to take all of that. (Amazon obviously disagrees, and as a consumer I'd prefer to see that reduced cost reflected in a lower sales price compared to physical books, since I'm getting a generally less useful product.)
The retail part includes the cost of physical bookstores, distribution, costs, and also costs of selling the books (as opposed to marketing), and has a lot of complexities like buyers deciding what books to buy, in what quantities and time schedules. Some of this persists with ebooks (among other things because the selling process and publisher relationships are often tightly tied to the dead-tree books), while other parts disappear. They still have to get the customers to show up and browse the shelves, even if they're only on a web server.
Ok, Ian, to be clear there that's 30% on wholesale, 30% on retail...
Under the current eBook models somebody is taking that 30% regardless.
So, it isn't 60% going back into the 'pot' it's more like 40% - and this all assumes 100% is e-distribution.
And none of this addresses: - upfront funding of the process - management of all the bits and the process - all the other 'bits' - and the other issue I have with this of what the actual money looks like
The assumption I'm hearing from many sources is that all these 'middle men' are ramping up the cost of books and that a direct market could be made where authors sell direct and make more from a lower cover price.
I'd want to see some numbers to show that the market for novels is that price elastic that reducing the prices by, say, 50% would increase sales enough for the model you're suggesting as a thought experiment to do anything than make what is, for most, a marginal occupation, even more marginal.
Right... which is pretty much what I suspected. We've had moderately successful apps - 100K downloads ish, which have made us a few hundred dollars. Revenue share isn't all that good.
Even a pretty damn successful e-book is likely to make all that much at $2.99 a book or so.
Interestingly, I know a couple of artists who do a lot of book covers. The art is amazing and the make good livings at it.
It would be interesting to hear Chris Moore or Jim Burns opinions on this topic.
Nothing can stop Amazon from doing anything, except the fear of spending money on something it could get for free.
But using a stock photo for cover design is way too dumb. You immediately lose any chance of establishing the book's unique identity as a digital object, or as a printed document.
I mean, take a look at this stock photo of a girl in red, holding a pistol:
http://www.crestock.com/image/271384-Girl-with-a-gun.aspx
Now go and take a look at the cover Alberto Seveso did for our host's latest novel, Rule 34. You just type or copy and paste Charles Stross Rule 34 in Google Image view.
There's no contest. The stock photo is a throwaway image. The illustration by Seveso is memorable and unique. That's what you get when you pay an art director and an artist. That's what anyone who's seriously thinking of self-publishing fiction should go and get.
Okay, I haven't conducted a market study or anything, but I besides my kindle (which I love) I got a phone from Verizon on which I can read all my Amazon books. I say again, what is the big deal?
Bingo! This is the attitude of oh, Id hazard a guess at a good 80% of ebook readers. Probably more like 90% but let's be conservative.
The more I think about it, the more I think what really is going on here is the early days of the ebook format wars, epub vs kindle. But unlike with the Beta/VHS or HD/Blu-Ray kindle ebooks can be read on quite a lot of devices easily. Epub the same. The only reason both formats aren't universal is because of the recalcitrance of Apple and Amazon, respectively. But these are policy matters, not technical ones. And they could easily change, rendering the whole DRM issue moot. DRM ceases to have a meaningful effect if you can download a free app onto any device to read whatever book you want. Imagine how the VHS/Beta debate would have ended if all you had to do to make a machine play either was flick a switch?
I previously posted on a similar topic here. I even broached the word "disintermediation" somewhat prior to our esteemed host (at least in this context). I stand by my previous statement then. Apple (in court as we speak for both practices mono-* in the OP) has provided both a reader (3 actually) and a market wherein the product can be sold. Unfortunately for the consumer, they appear to have colluded on pricing. We only need a third strong player and the McKinsey magic can begin. BTW it was a friend and author who frequents this site (not to worry Charlie, he writes textbooks, lots of them) who sent me this quote: Libertarianism, like Leninism, is an attractive, internally consistent ideology which provides a prescription for achieving a utopian society populated entirely by frictionless perfectly spherical human beings. I can be forgiven for wanting to talk libertarianism then can I not?
As far as what the author will have to do him/herself in the self-publishing or ebook-through-Amazon world:
Finances (advances, etc.) - no advances when you self-publish or publish through Amazon, so this goes away. You still have to manage your income yourself, but you were already doing that (surely you balance your checkbook), so no added costs there.
Graphic design (book covers, maybe other things like posters or website design) - this is an added cost. If you're an author who wants to self-publish, find a good graphic designer ASAP and establish a long-term relationship with him/her; it will pay off big in the long run. You could do it yourself, but chances are it will look terrible (most authors are not artists).
Editing: another thing authors shouldn't try to do for themselves. An author who edits her/his own book is like a lawyer who defends him/herself: they each have a fool for a client. Again, this costs.
Marketing, promotion and PR: Ah, here the author will be better off doing it him/herself. Who else feels as passionately about the book as the one who wrote it? Sure, the author doesn't have the contacts in the bookstore industry that the publisher does, but s/he isn't trying to sell to bookstores, is s/he? And unless s/he was a bestseller, how much did the publisher really do for her/his book, anyway? Have you ever read Sarah Hoyt's article/rant entitled "He Beats Me But He's My Publisher"? Let's just say that she's... unimpressed with how the publishing industry markets the books of most of their authors.
Distribution and warehousing: As has already been pointed out, this cost disappears with ebooks. Given the size of an ebook file, if your Internet bandwidth costs are starting to rise, then you're already selling millions of copies. Plenty of authors would kill to have this problem.
So what this boils down to is two things (cover design and editing) that an author considering going indie will have to contract out for, and another thing (PR) that s/he will probably have to do for her/himself. Somehow I can't see the costs of cover design and editing going anywhere near 60% of gross. And while the work needed to do PR will certainly cut into time the author could spend writing more books, what's the proportion going to be? Especially since many of the most time-consuming parts of PR (attending cons, booksignings, and other events) is stuff the author would already have to do anyway...
Let's pull some numbers out of a hat and look at them. Let's give some very pessimistic estimate for the cost of cover design and editing at 15% of gross, each. 30% total. You're now looking at taking home profits 40%, not 70%, of the gross. Then let's also say that PR will eat up fully half your writing time, which means your next book will take twice as long to come out. This is the equivalent of cutting your profits in half, so you end up at 20% profits. This is still twice as much as the 10% of gross that you were estimating authors get from their publishers under their current contracts.
Personally, if I were an author pondering whether to go with a conventional publisher or whether to go indie, I'd jump indie in a heartbeat with those kinds of numbers. And I'm pretty sure I was being pessimistic in my estimates.
Alain your preaching to the choir on the quality difference between stock images and an actual cover designer. But the majority of the self published authors who would have slapped something together themselves would never hire a designer or illustrator. But if after uploading, Amazon spits out a cover design for the low price of $20 let's say, which will be a fraction the quality of Alberto's work but exponentially better than what the author would have done themselves I could see them biting on that.
The author can feel like they got a "real" cover, as awful as it may be. Amazon can pocket another $10-$15 bucks without any sales of the book. Illustrators and designers can shake their fists and/or cry in there beer.
It's a win win as long as your not in group three, or you know, have taste.
Not that I'm advocating for it mind you. Far from it. Just seems like something they could implement fairly easily.
Robin Munn, Daveon,
You're still missing the point I think - the primary point is that the world of eBooks is a revolution, a primary scale disruption, to the literary marketplace. The workflow, the sale price, the economics and practicalities of the new world are not likely to be the same as the old one.
As I pointed up, and Robin agreed, 60% of the current gross price is likely to end up at ~10%. Lots of ways to make that happen, and I'm sure Amazon are working most of them already. As such at least half of the price we are currently supposed to play is up in the air EVEN IF NOTHING ELSE CHANGED.
However we can be fairly certain that the other elements WILL change. Maybe the publishers will go under, maybe copy editing and layout will be significantly automated, maybe nobody will care about layout and it will be done automatically on the fly to fit the screen. I point out the covers not to kick off an argument about how valuable a designer is - but to point out an eBook cover and a hardback cover are DIFFERENT THINGS, doing DIFFERENT JOBS, in a DIFFERENT SCENARIO. Who's to say you don't have multiple cheaply produced different covers, targeted and personalised to individual customer predilections? We aren't in Kansas anymore, it's a new game.
The more you look back, rather than forward, the more you get it wrong.
And at this point, when it's all to play for, it's an opportunity for the authors, as a species, to make sure they come out of it ahead. To me, there appears to be a model where most of the non-writing tasks are still offloaded, but authors have the option of much more control and 3-4x the margin on similar or greater volumes.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd suggest the possibility - compared to the alternatives, means it's worth considering.
Eliminating DRM on Amazon's ebooks is not enough to make them acceptable, because they attack readers' freedom in other ways too. See http://gnu.org/philosophy/the-danger-of-ebooks.html.
Ethical ebooks must respect, both in principle and in practice, all the rights that we have as owners of printed books. And until they do, we must campaign against them.
Selling ebooks to anonymous purchasers is a challenge, but not impossible. Physical stores can do it. Selling ebooks for cash could be an added business for physical bookstores.
Ian, Robin. I want to make one thing clear. IF you are an author who wants to self publish in this 'brave, new, world' then have at it.
I don't think that, for most new authors, the rewards will be all that to write home about and, in all honesty, probably worse when you factor in all the non-writing work you do than the current system.
The assumptions in your logic I struggle most with are: - prices stay the same... I already seen a LOT of people here complaining about prices because 'e-books cost much less to produce', and I'm seeing a lot of indie people publishing in the 'app' prize range of $1-$2 a unit... that's not far off what a published author with a publisher gets now... so no real win if you only get 50% of that price! - volumes remain the same or go up. Again, I see no evidence of that. I can't speak for others but my consumption of the written word, i.e. the price elasticity of my consumption of novels is basically flat. There is a fixed number of books I can read a year and lower prices won't mean I buy more... the converse might be true and at certain high price points I'll stop buying - that the 'soft' non-writing functions are all easy to replace. As a small business owner who hires marketing and PR people and others because they're not simple skills, I think you're strongly underestimating the complexity of those tasks
You'll let the author's politics decide what fiction you'll read? That's like going vegetarian because cattle aren't monogamous. As I see it, libertarianism has bright , shiny aspects that appeal to the unappealing, who will ignore the aspects that might prove to be a positive. Your movement has become a stalking horse for enormous money.
A final note before I sleep...
I strongly suspect that marketing and PR will be what actually save 'traditional' publishing. If the supply of books increases the way I think it will, and readers are being used to filter the slush pile, I think there will be a LOT of hobby writers earning roughly $0.00 a year, actually, probably -$$$ and people still buying books from Tor and others because they know what they're getting.
I also suspect that those that do well from indie stuff will probably end up taking contracts with conventional publishers too.
The indie stuff might change the entry route to being a published author but unless people find a lot more hours to read new books all the time, I'm not sure how all this supply translates into anything but a hobby.
I've seen the same reaction to Charlie's comment from several unfamiliar comment posters.
What part of "in my experience" isn't getting across?
This is what Charlie wrote:
I'm not going to lecture you about Jeff Bezos either, although I do want to note that he came out of a hedge fund and he's ostensibly a libertarian; these aspects of his background make me uneasy, because in my experience they tend to be found in conjunction with a social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity.
You all seem to have hooked onto the "libertarian" and skipped over the "hedge fund" element, and then claimed that Charlie's experience is no more than the parroting of a stereotype.
I could certainly argue that success in the hedge fund business is something that correlates with patterns of thinking that would warp any political or economic philosophy a person might claim to support.
The apparent Libertarian reaction in this comment thread does the ideals of Libertarianism no credit. My understanding is that you are expected to make your own free choices, and the way in which you blithely skip over part of the evidence, even hide it, leaves me wondering whether you can be trusted.
Yeah, you're right. Amazon could do that but then they would be violating YOG's law openly, blatantly instead of sort - of - indirectly as they are doing now.
Pocketing that $15 for a stock image cover before making any sales would establish them automatically as vanity publishers. Right now they're craftily skirting that extremely dangerous status.
Just thinking about cover design for ebooks, I'm not sure that current physical book cover designs would work well for an ebook.
We see thumbnails and other small images on the web pages selling the book.
Most ebook readers only display monochrome images.
All this works against current design trends. I'm not talking about things such as awkwardly-posed humans, fun though it is to diagnose the spinal conditions apparent. Drop the colour and shrink the image, and do you have anything left?
What I am seeing are some striking differences between paperback and Kindle editions of the same book. "The Mote in God's Eye" is a good example. The Kindle image is essentially title and author names in very large text. The paperback still has the title clear, but about half the area is clear of text.
And there are past cover styles which would work fairly well for ebooks. Look at the original corporate style for Penguin—bold bands of colour, a clear title, it is something they have revived for their ebooks.
I think a sensible amateur, who checked the grey-scale version, could make a good enough "cover" for an ebook. Or they could completely botch it. But it is a different problem, and the answers don't need to include dramatic scenery, ominous castles, or brooding half-clad heroes. It would maybe have more in common with a newspaper headline than with a Frazetta painting.
I have just realised that now have an excuse to write a story about the unexpected sinking of a warship, which will be entitled "Gotcha"
Incidentally, Charlie has an advantage in the ebook cover-design game: "Stross" is short and unusual. You can see a two-line "Charlie Stross" as a strong design element. It's already something of a brand.
Eh, why? If you succeed at selfpublishing, that means you have already demonstrated either the skillset or the contacts to do without the services of a publisher, so what concivable upside is there to signing over that much of your revenue? If anything, there is a strong financial incentive for authors with traditional publishers to jump ship and hire the services of an editor directly, because they have something a new selfpublisher doesnt ; a fanbase.
Well, this took me a couple of days to do, including have Fiona dress up in Trafalgar Square. It's rather indicative of London that nobody noticed. http://www.neopax.com/technomage/covers.jpg
Because you want to write, not run a business?
Also, potentially, because the money you are offered is more than you are making as a successful selfpublished author even if you are getting a lower percentage of revenue. Amanda Hocking's deal was reported at $2 million. And bear in mind that an ideal endstate for many might be a mixture of a contract with a traditional publisher for one set of books, a one-off deal with Amazon for an exclusive eBook, a Kickstarter funded selfpublished collection of essays and a stream of short stories you release and distribute on your own for free or near as damn it. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Sidenote: the sets of readers and fanbase are not equal.
Ok, cover 1 is a plain acid yellow, with the words "Rule 34" and "Charles Stross" on it in black sans serif. cover 2 has the title "The Dragon-hiker's Guide to Lost Covenant at Foundation's End" (thanks to Dave Langford) by "Joseph Bloggs" and an Anne Sudworth painting.
Do you actually think may people are going to buy Dragon-hiker over Rule 34 on the covers?
My previous comment on this subject disappeared into moderation, probably because I was posting too fast. So, having waited an hour or so, here's my comment again.
Daveon, you wrote:
I'd want to see some numbers to show that the market for novels is that price elastic that reducing the prices by, say, 50% would increase sales enough ...
I found some numbers for you. Dave Slusher did some analysis on sales numbers that J. A. Konrath had posted to his blog (Konrath's blog post seems to have disappeared so I can't link it, but I'll trust that Slusher got his figures correct since his graphs look entirely plausible to me). I won't copy his graphs here since filling the comments section with a bunch of IMG tags would be kind of rude to our gracious blog host :-), but you can click over to his post and look at the graphs for yourself. What he found was that the $2.99 to $3.99 price point was the ideal price point for ebooks if your goal was to maximise total revenue. Lower than that and your sales aren't increasing fast enough to recoup the price drop, but too far above the five dollar price point and your sales drop too fast, and again you don't make as much money as at the $2.99 price point.
P.S. Also, you can click on the "he did raise prices based on his observation of data" link in Mr. Slusher's article to read J. A. Konrath's thoughts about the whole thing.
Ah - I found J. A. Konrath's original numbers: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2009/10/kindle-numbers-traditional-publishing.html
That's a fascinating read, but it finishes
"It’s a failure of clarity in my original article, but I’m not advocated for $2.99 as the perfect One True Price for all ebooks forever. That was true for this data set, which is already a year old. This might well change over time, differ from author to author, genre to genre or publisher to publisher. What I do want injected into the thinking is that these numbers are calculable and measurable."
so he is not, in fact, saying that he found the $2.99 to $3.99 price point was the ideal price point for ebooks if your goal was to maximise total revenue.
I would add to that we need to know more about how eBook pricing will work over a longer period of time to know what the initial pricing should be and if, and how, it should change.
Ian -
As I pointed up, and Robin agreed, 60% of the current gross price is likely to end up at ~10%.
I'm not sure I agree with that, because I'm not entirely clear on what you're saying with that sentence. :-) If you're saying that authors' net take-home, even under self-publishing routes, is going to end up being around 10% of gross revenue, then I think I disagree. But my numbers are guesswork, and I'm open to being corrected from the actual experience of published authors. (I'm not one of those, though my sister is -- but one book, published just last year, is not enough of a data point to draw any conclusions from.)
But I do agree with your point that ebooks are a revolutionary technology, and that the future of the book market probably looks a lot more different than most people are imagining. If I was advising a new author, I'd tell them -- okay, well first I'd tell them to go to someone with a lot more experience than me, since I've only gained my knowledge of the publishing industry second hand :-) -- but if they still wanted my advice, I'd tell them to explore self-publishing first. And if they did sign a contract with a publisher, to make darn sure they don't sign away more rights than they intended. What about audiobooks? What about the right to price the book at a loss leader price point for a few days? What about the right to movie contracts? (Not gonna happen for most authors, don't get your hopes up -- but don't sign away rights to anything without thinking through the possible ramifications first.) What about the rights to the Virtual Holo-Reality(TM) adaptation using technology that will be invented in 2036? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera -- I'd sure you get the point.
Point is, in a rapidly-changing market like the ebook market, it's the nimble and adaptable that have the best chance of thriving. If you chain yourself to a slow-moving dinosaur with a legacy publishing contract that restricts your rights too much, you're going to find yourself unable to adapt to rapidly-changing market conditions nearly as well as Joe Self-Published over there. You know, the guy who just signed a lucrative deal for those Virtual Holo-Reality(TM) adaptation rights that you signed away without thinking about them.
CS Clark -
Not for all ebooks, no. It's still worth experimenting with the price. But that doesn't mean you can't usefully extrapolate from his data set. And it does mean that an author would be wise not to bind her/himself too tightly to contracts that let the publisher set the price for her/his books, because then s/he'll be unable to experiment with prices and find what price point is ideal this year/quarter/month.
And if you look at his graph, it does show that for the data set in question, $3-$4 was the ideal price point to maximise author revenue.
The link you posted doesn't work: I get a "404 - page not found" message. Pity, it looked from your description like an argument worth reading.
[[ Moderator: I have patched the HTML to remove the trailing full stop on RMS's link ]]
Very interesting post and subsequent discussion, Charlie. Thank you.
I'm not disagreeing with any of that, I just wouldn't want people to take away PRICE > $3.99 = SELF-DEFEATING GREED for all eBooks regardless of all the other factors. We're already in a discussion where what are actually lots of different industries called publishing are treated by most people as the same thing.
And it does mean that an author would be wise not to bind her/himself too tightly to contracts that let the publisher set the price for her/his books, because then s/he'll be unable to experiment with prices and find what price point is ideal this year/quarter/month.
If we change author to publisher and publisher to Amazon aren't we're back where we started?
Ian, we can be fairly certain that the other elements WILL change. Maybe the publishers will go under, maybe copy editing and layout will be significantly automated, maybe nobody will care about layout and it will be done automatically on the fly to fit the screen.
Yes/no/maybe.
Publishers going under: some will, some won't. Copy editing can't be automated, it's an AI-complete problem: merely running text through a spelling checker won't catch all mis-spellings (where there's a valid word substitution -- e.g. their, there) let alone grammatical infelicities and continuity errors, much less work out the correct way to canonicalize usage for internal consistency. (Author used "Doctor", "doctor", "Dr.", "Dr", or "dr" at various points in the text: which do you settle on?) Layout ... can be automated, to a very limited degree, for plain text as in a novel, but again, there are huge gotchas and it depends on the author getting it mostly right in the first place. (How do you introduce a new paragraph? Or indicate continuous dialog across a paragraph break? What hyphenation rules do you want to use? How about right-justification versus ragged margin, and what are you going to do to minimize ladders and runs in auto-reflowed layout?)
From a distance, all problems look easy. Up close? Not so much.
A fried of mine (professionally published, doesn't post here) had these professional services but her book still consistently substitutes "loose" for "lose".
And I'd suggest that it can be correct, or at leasr read better, to use different variations on the "doctor example" depending on context.
Scott @ 487 We're a republic anyway. Err, so was tthe most serene Republic of Venice - a cruel oligarchy. And your point was? The Tea Party demonstrations are pretty good proof that the theme is well paid-for by rich crooks like the Kochs ... Oops, that's not what you meant, but is an inconvenient truth. What a shame. And your point, was, again?
Alain @ 488 Like Chris Foss, you mean? Double fail, I think! ... see also Bill Stewart @ 519 (!)
k2 @ 496 the biggest monopsony coming is the single payor healthcare system As VERY SUCESSFULLY u sed in: Canada, France, Britain, Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand ... etc .... Which people will KILL TO KEEP. I think your so-called brain needs a re-wire. Or, at least some exposure to facts, rather than insurance company lies.
Widleyred @ 524 LURVE the quote. That is going into my commonplaces list. Can we, pretty please, have the author's name, so that his fame may be more widely spread for such an exquisite Bon mot?
Robin Munn @ 525 Marketing, promotion and PR: Ah, here the author will be better off doing it him/herself Err, no. See the comments by Dorothy L. Syers who was an advertising executive/copywriter on this subject in her novel: "Murder must Advertise" - still a classic.
Dirk @ 537 It's rather indicative of London that nobody noticed. No, I suspect a lot of people noticed, and went ..."it's another nutter, but it's probably harmless" (A la HitchHiker) and went their ways (!)
...and this has hit Forbes: http://onforb.es/HW7aJw
TL;DR if you don't care to click: they set up a straw man version of the word "monopoly", then point out that of course someone other than Amazon can set themselves up as an e-publisher.
Sean nailed that in the comments here at entry #12, and the commentators there are of a similar mind.
Greg, please say that you;re being sarcastic in asking for the name of the author of that quote!
As the teenage daughter of a friend of mine once said: "I thought you dressed weird until I went to London"
You want a really good example of a copy-editing nightmare?
The word "crown".
A crown is a type of dental prosthesis.
Or it's a metallic head-piece worn by reigning monarchs (no, "raining" is not what Lizzie Windsor does down in Buckingham Palace).
Or it's a metonym -- "the Crown" may refer, in a constitutional monarchy, to the symbolic source of political legitimacy (much as "the president" may refer to the office rather than the occupier of the office).
Or it may refer to the head that wears the aforementioned head-piece.
So: two common nouns, a metonymic usage which is probably a proper noun but might be a common noun, and a title.
No, the Chicago Manual of Style will not help you here. (We had a long argument about this on a mailing list for SF/Fantasy novelists, with editors chipping in. Serious skull-sprain ensued when we tried to agree on the capitalization rules to apply ...)
On the subject of book covers...
Many British SF fans of a certain age will recall tilling the shelves of the local library looking for bright-yellow books with no fancy graphics on the front cover, just the reassuring words "Gollancz SF" followed by the author's name and the title of the work. Similarly bookstore paperbacks from Penguin tended towards minimalist text-based covers rather than eye-catching illustrations.
I wonder if the traditional book-market's obsession with cover illustrations actually transfers to the e-book market. Do browsers in search of a reading fix peruse the cover illo thumbnails or do they tend to search for a particular series name or a favourite author or click on a recommended link, cover unseen?
Conversely I've noticed more and more book "trailers" appearing on Youtube and other video sites where the static book cover marketing tool has been replaced by moving pictures (and often copyright-free kazoo music soundtracks). For the self-publishing e-book marketer commissioning or creating such a trailer is a bigger step than getting good-quality static cover art but it might, based on the current novelty value if nothing else, pull in more eyeball-tracks and result in increased sales. Maybe.
"crown" is also a coin. Older issues were worth 25 pence, newer issues from the Mint have face values (in case you ever wondered where that phrase came from) of five quid.
The word can also apply to the top of a ridge or mountain or even a building, and so on.
As for copy-editing, this has been discussed before. Try running "Ulysses" or "Feersum Endjinn" or "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" through an automated grammar checker and watch the wheels come off.
Try it with almost any work of SF/Fantasy -- those examples are just the far flung outliers.
Dr Davidson entered the room "What are my chances Doctor?" he asked on hearing the word 'cancer'.
554 - I know that thank you. Just what other sort of book cover did you think I was describing as "chrome yellow with black sans serif lettering"?Ebooks are different to print books and it is therefore not surprising that the legal situation is different. Firstly electronic books are much easier to pirate, printing a book requires significant amounts of equipment that most people do not have easy access to while an ebook can be easily reproduced. DRM is in part an attempt to make reproducing the ebook as difficult as reproducing the print book inherently is. The with a print book the licensed copy of the text is inherently linked to the physical copy, so if you re-sell the book you lose access to it. While with an ebook lending or selling it doesn't lose you access unless further measures are taken, so either the licence is non-transferable or you need some method of ensuring that the licensed copy is fully transferred. Print books are a club good (excludable, non-rival), something which the market is fairly good at dealing with, your proposal would turn ebooks into a public good (non-excludable, non-rival) the market chronically under supplies public goods.
Greg -
I'm well aware of Murder Must Advertise - great book. But have you read the "He Beats Me, But He's My Publisher" article that I linked? I wasn't saying that authors will do spectacularly well at doing their own PR; I was saying that if Hoyt's assertions about the publishing industry are correct (and they fit with what I've heard from many other people, so I'm very inclined to believe that she knows what she's talking about), then most authors (i.e., those who are not bestsellers) are getting almost no help from the publicity the publisher undergoes on their behalf. Which means that they would easily be better off doing their own PR, because it's hard not to improve when the baseline is zero.
As for your comments about the Tea Party being funded by Koch: there's nothing I'll be able to say to convince you otherwise, so I won't try. But I do think you might find it instructive to try and find some Tea Party types and ask us (yes, I would be one of them) when they first heard of the Koch Brothers. I think you'd find that most Tea Partiers, including people in leadership positions in the movement, had never heard the name Koch until these reports started surfacing that the Koch brothers were somehow funding the Tea Party. Let me assure you that among the Tea Partiers that I know personally, the whole "Koch is funding the Tea Party" thing is a joke. Everyone I know who's involved in the Tea Party movement has started getting involved in politics because they care about things like the rapidly rising national debt, and so on, and not because anyone funded them.
Does that mean there isn't some astroturfing going on somewhere in the movement? No, of course not. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, after all. But everyone that I know personally in the movement is a genuine grassroots type, not an astroturf type. Not a very large sample size, I'll grant, but it's the only sample I have -- and it's 100%. Make of that what you will.
But getting myself back on topic here: at the time Dorothy Sayers wrote, you'd have been absolutely right. Effective advertising would have been best left to the trained professionals. But it's a few decades later, and the advent of Twitter, Facebook, and so on has disintermediated even the advertising industry to a great effect. Authors can, in a time-effective manner, keep in touch with fans via Twitter, or a Web forum, or other online presence, which would not have been possible a decade ago. To take Sayers' words and apply them slavishly to the current media climate would be making the same mistake that print publishers are making in ignoring the ebook revolution.
"The Mote in God's Eye" doesn't need a cover. It's one of the best-known science fiction books ever.
Gah. I meant "to a great extent", not "to a great effect". Even proofreading carefully can't catch everything.
Or if you really want your automated grammar checker to explode, try something by Zelazny...
550+ comments and nary a word about Barnes & Noble. A company that is competing with Amazon. It has brick and mortar stores, am online presence, self publishes books, has an book reader. It even sells other stuff than books.
But it is dying, and within about 2 decades of trying to kill off independent bookstores. Whatever one feels about the Amazon "company town", B&N surely tried to do the same in bricks and mortar retail, but is now the loser. Amazon is just better, period.
And no doubt one day Amazon will go the way of Sears, which in its heyday, was most even more powerful than Amazon is today.
CS Clark -
If we change author to publisher and publisher to Amazon aren't we're back where we started?
Heh. Maybe we would be, if there was a conspiracy of authors to fix prices... :-)
But I think there's one crucial distinction that makes it impossible to substitute "author" for "publisher" like they were two interchangeable algebraic variables, and it goes back to the point I made in my first comment (after I first discovered this blog post): authors are suppliers, while publishers are intermediaries. Without authors, publishers have no product. Without publishers, authors used to have no ability to reach customers... but the Internet is changing that.
So the two variables can't interchange in the equation, because they're of different types. It would be like substituting a value in meters per second squared (acceleration) for a value in miles per hour (speed), and thinking you can balance the equation by simply changing the multiplier coefficient. Nope: you've just changed the very nature of the equation by making that substitution.
But your comment does raise a very interesting point, which is that if the big publishers had been more interested in testing different price points and how the market responded to them, they might have noticed that "Hey, look at that -- we make more money overall at $4.99 (or whatever) than at $12.99!" And if they had done that early enough, they might not be in this fix (ha! unintentional pun there) now.
550+ comments and nary a word about Barnes & Noble
References to B&N run throughout this thread, including your own comment at 230, and yet you deny they exist? I boggle.
What were you actually trying to say?
You do realize that's the founder of the Free Software Movement you're replying to, right? You may be operating under incompatible assumptions.
I'm not sure if the figures are available anywhere, but it occurred to me to wonder what percentage of Amazon's revenue is currently generated by the bookstore arm of the operation?
A few comments brought up the idea that Amazon would be crazy to destroy traditional publishers, beggar professional authors, and thereby gut the whole writing and book-selling industry. But are they really killing a huge cash cow (from their point of view), or is the whole book-selling business simply running now as a loss leader to get consumers buying everything from Amazon?
(On the other hand, perhaps my musings have disappeared over the event-horizon of cynicism and into the realm of consipiracy-theorizing now!)
Do B&N actually exist over here (for values that include anywhere in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, but exclude North America)? I'm not sure they do.
paws4thot -
You know, if your intent is to persuade someone, derogatory terms like "Teabagger" aren't going to help. Just a tip. ;-)
But the point I'm trying to make has little to do with whether your average Tea Party attendee is aware of who's funding what group(s); rather, it had more to do with Greg Tingey's dismissal of the Tea Party movement as being, essentially, bought and paid for rather than a genuine movement. I don't have extensive experience of the movement, just the people I know in the Dallas area. Heck, for all I know, 99% of the Tea Party movement might consist of astroturfers, and the Dallas area people might be the only true grassroots people in the whole movement! I just know that of the sample I know, 100% are coming at it from genuine grassroots convictions, rather than because their convictions have been bought and paid for. And friends, that makes me think it's a movement.
And that's what it is, the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Deficit Movement, and... wait, sorry, got an Arlo Guthrie song stuck in my head for a second there. [grin]
Okay, now it's seriously stuck in my head. Pardon me while I go look for a Youtube clip. Or two or three. :-)
Okay, back now. I should probably wrap this up, since getting into an argument about politics is one of the things our blog host has specifically requested we NOT do. So before I let myself start arguing (hopefully I'm still at the level of making points politely and not stepping outside the bounds of my own experience), I should probably drop the subject.
But please do keep in mind that derogatory terms aren't going to win you many friends or help you persuade anyone. I'd really like to see a little less name-calling in politics. Much appreciated. :-)
Brett, please do not poke the bear with a stick. It will only annoy the bear, and possibly get you mauled.
A quick look at their web site and store locator in particular would seem to indicate that they only only operate bricks & mortar stores in the US.
Not sure what their shipping policies are to the rest of the world, and whether they would run afoul of publishing regions.
Shipping information on the B&N site is not clear on the matter, but would seem to indicate that they don't ship outside the US.
So it's probable that, in global terms, discussing them in the same breath as Amazon is almost pointless.
I think there is a confusion here, between intermediaries (someone who takes a product and sells it on, perhaps aggregating, perhaps retailing, perhaps just moving it from one place to another) and value-adders.
An online store or a bookshop is an intermediary.
Contrariwise, a flour miller takes raw material and makes a product from them. He adds value by processing ingredients. The farmer can't sell the raw wheat to the end consumer because the consumer doesn't want wheat, it's too much hassle.
The miller will also aggregate the output of many farmers, but that is an economy of scale.
What a lot of people here seem to be saying is that a publisher is purely an intermediary. Contrariwise, what I read Charlie and others as saying is that the publisher is adding value. That editing and copy-editing, that book design, this is taking the raw material and turning it into something better. Unlike other industries, it's also feeding back to the original supplier, but it's still improving it.
What is confusing is that the external observer isn't seeing this. They see text in and text out, and think that's it.
They're also not seeing that the whole hardback/paperback pricing difference is because there's a reverse auction going on - they see a physically nicer object, and think the extra is for that difference, whereas the publisher has spent perhaps 50p on that, and the price difference is for the early access. Compare this to music CDs, where the music publishers/retailers also run a reverse auction, but don't usually bother to repackage the product when the price drops.
(I'll note when a CD of an artist I like comes out, and then buy months later when the price has dropped below a Godiva.)
B&N's Nook store only sells ebooks within the US (possibly North America). So no, they're nothing like a rival to AMZN.
References to them do.
On consideration, Alex may have been misusing 'nary' as a synonym for 'few'.
Robin: The article refers to sales of a few thousand there, if I'm reading it right.
I can't speak for actual numbers, but we know that our host is a full time professional writer. Let's assume that he currently is making $50,000 a year doing that. (I suspect strongly he does quite a bit better than that, but it's a nice number for maths purposes.)
Let's say that, on average, Charlie sells 10,000 copies at Hardcover Prices, and 50,000 at current eBook pricing levels of $12 and $8 respectively. (NOTE: This is PURELY using the Amazon numbers - because this includes dead tree sales too, the numbers are probably higher.) At 10% of the cover price, that pretty much gets us to $50,000. But from a business perspective that's $50,000 of profit. Charlie has some personal business costs in there as a self employed person, but he's got those anyway.
Moving to the model people here seem to be advocating, on first glance it looks amazing. On 60,000 sales, he's now got $180,000 - or $126,000 after the standard 'rake'.
Except we've already all agreed that he's likely to have to split that with the other soft skills he has to have. Assuming we stick to the 50/50 discussed up thread. This brings Charlie's revenue down to $63,000...
AND he's now got the headache of dealing with his own supplier base, his accounting needs have gone up and he still has costs in there that his publisher would have picked up.
Even if we allow that book sales go up by 30% according to the links you shared, that brings his revenue up to $80,000ish a year. Now that looks good on paper, but it's still not his profit, his non-writing workload, i.e. time not spent making money, has gone up... and so, I suspect has his stress.
I think think we're wayyyyy under estimating the actual cost of the soft functions and, unless I look at these numbers through very rose tinted glasses, the numbers involved just don't make it look very good for somebody who makes a living from writing.
If it's a hobby or a second income I think that's a different ball of wax.
Given the opportunity, I would actually advise a new author to do the opposite to some degree. Assuming this author can get an experienced agent that can intelligently fight for a good contract, having a slow dinosaur at your back can be both instructive and helpful. It would be silly to commit to exclusively releasing all of one's work through a single publishing house or to forgo self-publishing, but the process of producing a saleable book has enough pitfalls that it would be handy to use the traditional publishing experience as an instructional period. You may not stand to reap as much of the profit if sales take off, but learning the ropes is valuable and the costs of failure are much higher when you have to solely bear the financial burden associated with production and marketing costs.
The prospect of an advance isn't anything to sneeze at. Even if the publisher doesn't put any mojo on your book, you have a check in hand. Going the self-publishing route is as risky as starting a business and the investment in production and promotion that you've made translates into a loss if sales are poor. For a new author, I would think that would be more discouraging creatively as well as potentially devastating financially.
And it's not just pure numbers, as Charlie has said before: In this brave new model, YOU ONLY GET THE MONEY AFTER THE SALES ARE MADE. You have nothing to live on while you write. The importance and impact of the risk that the publisher assumes, and removes from the shoulders of the writer, cannot be overestimated.
In this context, the term "teabagger" was coined by the Tea Party themselves. Next?
But your comment does raise a very interesting point, which is that if the big publishers had been more interested in testing different price points and how the market responded to them, they might have noticed that "Hey, look at that -- we make more money overall at $4.99 (or whatever) than at $12.99!"
There is an assumption here that the big, multi-billion dollar, publishers haven't actually run these numbers. I find it pretty unlikely, to be honest, that they haven't. They also have data points on Amazon and Supermarket based discounting on cover prices to know exactly what that does to profit margins.
I also think people need to remember that the ONLY number that matters for most sensible businesses is profit. Books and MBAs are written on the relationship between revenue and profit and sales.
Increasing sales doesn't necessarily increase your profit, and likewise, even if it does, it might reduce your margins by such a degree that you're extremely exposes to downturns.
I'm not in publishing but I've worked most of my adult life in the consulting services sector and this feels very similar.
@Dave - actually, I do keep bringing that up :)
Best case, on my fantasy numbers, it's going to cost the author 5% of his revenue in interest charges, I suspect it's more like another 10%...
All of which, based on my BoE stuff makes it look pretty marginal as a self run business.
This doesn't surprise me in the least.
No, it wasn't; it was applied to them by people who knew what the joke was, got picked up briefly until they figured out why some people were sniggering, and they stopped using it. It has still been applied to them.
Yeah I know, I'm more commenting on some of the problems with his arguments than actually speaking to him. He's something of a hypocrite on this as he supports using copyright law and limited licences to restrict how you use software, the GNU licence explicitly restricts how you can use code, for example forbidding incorporating open source software into closed source software. Somehow it is illegitimate to use copyright to impose restrictions on the use of ebooks.
I've been reading DRM-free e-books from BAEN books since 2003. Go, read what Jim Baen and Eric Flint, publisher and the current editor-in-chief, had to say about e-books and DRM. Way back when.
For anyone unfamiliar, BAEN is publisher for a lot of best-selling science fiction authors. Uncoincidently to BAEN's use of not only DRM-free, but actually free-free, e-books, BAEN's authors have become almost the only ones I buy. Often, in hardback so I don't have to wait six months for a paperback. But I can buy it through Baen.com as an ebook a month before printing, for less than paperback price, if I don't insist on holding paper in my hands.
Is there piracy of Baen e-books? Lord, yes. Just get on bittorrent. Is it hurting Baen or their authors? They say no, profits are doing fine. They call piracy free advertising.
Amazon poses me a question - which is, I think, the same question every reader has:
How will I know which new books to buy?
or
How will I know that the new book I buy will be a good book, and a useful work of art?
Publishers, retailers, and professional consumers are tastemakers, leading the reading public in the dance of consumption. And books are cultural artifacts that are produced to be interpreted and used according to a set of aesthetic and practical rules. The purchase price of a book pays for skilled selection and preparation of the book for consumption by readers. If margins on sales of new books are reduced, where will well-prepared books come from?
And those people should be completely free to do whatever they like about that, as long as it doesn't involve taking my property from me by force. ... So you'd rather set up systems where by that's the most likely outcome?
That outcome is what's happening now! I would like to set up a system whereby people do not force each other to pay for anything that is not legitimately a public good (i.e. roads, protection from violence/coercion, regulation of externalities, etc).
You say most people don't want to see others starving in the streets, yet you assume they don't care enough to voluntarily pay to help them.
(Note to moderator: Please read the post, Charlie raised the topic of libertarian philosophy. It isn't like we've devolved into a discussion of the mating habits of Tazmanian beetles here.)
Buying only Baen authors sure does limit your reading.
People who own Kindles frequently don't buy from anything but the Kindle store
Exactly. I've had one for about a year and it already seems unbelievable I used to have to lug books around. (Granted, this may be partly just because I've been reading Neal Stephenson...)
You say: "obscure items would be listed as available but only ordered from the supplier when a customer requested one." AFAIK, this statement is erroneous. Items marked as available were in distribution centers.
Thank you, that was my experience as a customer but it's good to hear the same from an Amazon employee.
You say most people don't want to see others starving in the streets, yet you assume they don't care enough to voluntarily pay to help them.
Yes, I do assume that because like it or not it is true.
You do not get to tell me what is legitimately a public good. We get to have a public debate about what you think is a public good, and what I think is a public good and what everybody else thinks is one, and then we make our decisions based on that.
"This is Unix. I know Unix."
I am possibly the only person in the theater who cheered at that line. I was a senior editor at Unix Today at the time.
Of course what we saw her do on the display was totally universal unix. Right?
Yes, I do assume that because like it or not it is true.
Charities exist.
You do not get to tell me what is legitimately a public good.
Well, public good has a specific meaning. You're confusing "public good" with "things I think the gov't should provide" which is entirely different.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
Anyways Bezos, interestingly, is (like Peter Thiel) a supporter of the Patri Friedman project to actually try to assemble a society built on libertarian lines, so maybe we'll get to find out!
Charities exist.
Are there no workhouses, no prisons?
Seriously. That's what you've got? Have you looked at the problems charities in are at the moment? Not to mention the batshit politics that are going on around them. Nor the fact that income isn't exactly distributed all that effectively to allow most people to actually give any money to charity.
Ignoring taxes, real incomes for the vast majority of people have stagnated for the last 30 years!
And, bringing this back to Amazon for a moment. Here's how a large company, with lots of money, who are maximizing their profits through tax avoidance handles charity.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2009/03/the_new_scrooge.html
Whereas when I was growing up in New York, I'd scan the library shelves looking for a small yellow sticker on the lower spine of a book, with a red rocketship-in-atom icon.
I bought a CafePress messenger bag with that logo on it, but I didn't care for it as a bag. I should look for the T-shirt.
Well, public good has a specific meaning.
Really? Because I just spent some time online checking that, and that seems to be a pretty debatable point. You are confusing your opinions with actual facts.
Old John D Rockefeller' Standard Oil was called a trust and caused the first anti-trust laws. He never under stood why the government was so mad at him. He just sold the best oil at the best prices. Well people really were out to get him so they could make more money by selling at their prices. Maybe Amazon is becoming that kind of trust. If its so bad then use the anti-trust laws.
I think you sound like a bunch of hysterical, buggy whip makers. Selling more books cheaper is a good thing for all. I like to go to book stores, but there are a lot of things I liked. Things change.
Back when they were first talking about E-Books they said that book stores would make there own books as needed.
Let me offer some numerical explanation as to why charities are sufficient. At the depths of the Great Depression, roughly 1% of Americans received gov't assistance, and still starvation was very rare. Today, PPP per capita GDP is arouond 10x higher -- the poor have an obesity problem. It's exceedingly unlikely anyone is going to starve.
Real living standards for the vast majority of people have risen quite a lot -- much of what we take for granted (air travel, long-distance calling, food variety, etc) was generally the province of the wealthy or didn't even exist then, but are now common thanks to the work of entrepreneurs like Bezos.
Amazon's charity work is in their pricing. The same is true for Walmart, which has done more for the living standards of the poor than any gov't program could.
Back to work for me, but thanks for an interesting discussion!
You are assuming that authors get agents = publication. This is not necessarily the way it actually works, even with good writers. I know authors who have agents (good ones, I've read their stuff) who are not getting through the gate to get those advances. I know one, as I said before, whose manuscript was hand-delivered by a Reasonably Well Known Author to a Really Well Known Editor, and it's been three years. The system of acquiring new authors is seriously broken, folks. Authors who were in print already are bailing out of the print system, because they're doing their own PR already, the covers they get suck rocks (yes, Baen, I'm talking to you), and in many cases they really can do a better job on their own, or hire someone who is actually paying attention to their needs.
At some point, new writers need to look after themselves. Even with an agent, circulation time is sometimes measured in years. How long does a writer wait to see the gate open for them? Yes, we read about people getting published in three months. I also read about the three major winners of the Megamillions ticket, too.
Many writers have jolly well tried to get through the traditional system. Clue: not all of them are sucky writers. There simply isn't room in traditional publishing for all the people who are genuinely good, not the way the system is working now.
How long does a writer try to work the system? Five years? Ten?
Many British SF fans of a certain age will recall tilling the shelves of the local library looking for bright-yellow books with no fancy graphics on the front cover, just the reassuring words "Gollancz SF" followed by the author's name and the title of the work Gollancz has actually resurrected that approach for their SF Gateway ebook line (which I'm very fond of).
What I am seeing are some striking differences between paperback and Kindle editions of the same book. "The Mote in God's Eye" is a good example. The Kindle image is essentially title and author names in very large text. The paperback still has the title clear, but about half the area is clear of text.
I've noticed the same thing. When it comes to eBooks, it's less a cover illustration and more of an icon or web button. Good eBook covers need to be very simple, because they're doing the bulk of their work at a very small scale.
I'm preparing a novella for publication as an eBook through the Kindle Singles program, and so have been looking at the cover designs for eBooks. Most are pretty bad. But then, walking though my local bookstore, I look at the covers and see that the vast majority of them are also pretty bad, just in a different way.
The nicely designed ebook covers are more like rock posters or indie rock albun covers. The Byliner Originals are the best, reminiscent of the old Penguin Classics only with brighter colors.
Really? Because I just spent some time online checking that, and that seems to be a pretty debatable point. You are confusing your opinions with actual facts.
The economic concept of "public good" is sometimes a bit fuzzy in terms of specific application, but "non-rivalrous, non-excludable" is the basic accepted definition. It is definitely not the same as "things people think the gov't should provide" which includes all sorts of things that are generally agreed to not be public goods even by those who advocate that the gov't provide them.
In any case I only offered the concept to differentiate libertarian thoughts on the scope of gov't (libertarians are really the only group who want to confine gov't spending to legitimate public goods; conservatives want moral enforcement, leftists want redistribution). Hope this helps! And, I'm off.
Let me offer some numerical explanation as to why charities are sufficient. At the depths of the Great Depression, roughly 1% of Americans received gov't assistance, and still starvation was very rare.
So you don't think the fact that the New Deal in the US and the Welfare State and NHS in the UK came along after the Great Depression isn't linked, partly, to how bleeding inadequate that all was?
Funny thing. Here's some more numerical explanation for you. In the immediate period post-war and running into the 70s, everybody got better off, and a LOT better off. Since the 1980s only the top earner have got better off. Because Walmart are selling you low price crap from China which you can pay for with credit, doesn't mean you're better off than people were 40 years ago. It just means you're spending more stuff and paying more interest.
Good luck having the kind of retirement your parents could look forward to!
At the depths of the Great Depression, roughly 1% of Americans received gov't assistance, and still starvation was very rare.
Cite, please. Both assertions -- 1% receiving govt. assistance, and starvation being very rare -- demand documentary evidence; they sound highly suspect.
Note that when evaluating employment the key figure to look at is not the official headline unemployment rate, which in any event is regularly massaged by government agencies to make the economy look "healthier", but the full employment rate, i.e. the proportion of the population who are fully employed in jobs which match their training/skills. It's a bit harder to find these figures, but they tend to be eye-opening when you see them.
Baen is proof that you don't need DRM to make money out of ebooks, but I wonder if the figures will look as good when ebooks don't have the novelty element. 8 years ago, when I was reading the ebook on my computer screen and then buying the paperback, the paperback was far more portable. That balance has shifted.
Funny thing. Here's some more numerical explanation for you. In the immediate period post-war and running into the 70s, everybody got better off, and a LOT better off. Since the 1980s only the top earner have got better off.
And how much of that was because the US (at first) and the EU (a little later) were supplying the world with industrial goods. As those outside of the US/CA/EU orbits built up their industry, ours went down. (In general.) The real question in my mind is how do we change our (US/UK/??) economies such that we can be reasonably well off when others don't have to buy nearly everything from us. So far most politicians of any stripe and their fervent supporters don't want to open this door.
I'd gladly take $80K a year for writing and marketing my own work. Hell, I'd do it for $50K/yr. None of my day jobs have ever paid that well. Even if some of my overhead is editing services and cover design, I'm failing to see the downside.
And how much of that was because the US (at first) and the EU (a little later) were supplying the world with industrial goods.
Frankly, I think this is something of a red herring, both in the context of this discussion and the others we've been having.... both the US and UK actually still have quite productive manufacturing sectors, and strong IT sectors which aren't really going anyway.
It's not a zero sum game, the size of the global market increases and the playing field levels. In the 3 years I worked with an outsourcing team in Russia, I watched their average pay for an engineer go from $18,000 a year, to $30,000, purely because of increased competition... it's already getting to the point where there isn't much point in me off-shoring development because I get contractors locally to me for roughly the same money.
In short. I don't think this is the problem at all.
An excellent post. I've got extensive opinions on the topic, so I'll just link to the blog article I wrote on it: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2012/04/tsop-part-ii-ebook-pricing-and-doj.html
I quote this article in there, as well some other authors. What I find most interesting is how few people are considering the authors' interests in this whole thing. I don't think authors--and new authors in particular--are compensated enough for all their hard work, and ebooks potentially provide an opportunity to hash out a new, fairer revenue model.
I definitely don't think that getting an agent=publishing deal. In a position where a publishing deal is on the table, having an agent makes the contract negotiation less fraught, especially for an inexperienced author.
Further, I still think that if a publishing deal is in the cards, then it's worth pursuing. At the same time, waiting for Tor or Random House to pull your lottery number isn't realistic and definitely isn't paying any money. My worry is that first-time authors will invest a great deal of cash into polishing their manuscripts and lose their shirts in the self-pub game or worse get caught up in a scammy vanity publishing scheme. Some of the self-pub advocates in this thread have outlined what amounts to a hefty up-front investment in business infrastructure and in a situation where there exists a choice between a publishing deal and going it alone, it seems like it would be daft to turn down the deal.
For those that aren't being courted by publishers, self-pubbing is worthwhile but it's quite easy to over-invest in one's own work and not receive the expected returns. The saving grace of the Amazon slush-pile is that authors remain pretty darned anonymous unless their sales take off. Any embarrassing failures can easily be shrugged off and not reflect on future work. Inexperienced authors can afford to be cautious and financially conservative since the overall level of amateurish material lowers the bar enough that a book produced with minimal expense can still be saleable.
For established authors, it's a much tougher choice. Unless they have other income, most full-time authors wouldn't be able to afford to fund the efforts to put out books comparable to their existing work. This brave new world offers for them a significantly diminished standard of living, at least for a time, and has the potential to alienate fans with relatively shoddy work or lower output. Alternatively, there's the option of stepping up the pace and easing into self-pubbed work while maintaining word counts on contracted work. Sounds like a recipe for burnout. I hope that if the major publishing houses do go bust, they at least go out in a burst of glory by releasing rights back to authors before going out of business. That might give folks like Charlie a continued income while they try and adapt to the new system.
Keith: my point was using that as a hypothetical income.
I'll try a different example:
You get paid $30,000 a year for 40 hours a week, for 46 weeks of labour a year.
You are offered $50,000 a year for 60 hours a week, for 50 weeks of labour a year.
Which do you take ad why?
(And note, this is MUCH more interesting the spreadsheet I am supposed to be working on....)
Simple experience in the UK demonstrates that charities are insufficient to meet the needs of the population for health, education, good food and water etc.
Plus living standards will naturally tend to improve in any situation where you have technological advances and the ability to introduce them across the economy. The type of political-economic setup you have can affect things, but as long as it isn't actively against new technology, things will improve. The question is what sort of distribution of the benefits from the improvements you want. Many of us on here, including I believe our host, want a broad distribution. Many of the newcomers likely don't want to mandate what the distribution is but think that some sort of market mediated natural justice will arise. Obviously we rather disagree with that.
Frankly, I think this is something of a red herring, both in the context of this discussion and the others we've been having.... both the US and UK actually still have quite productive manufacturing sectors, and strong IT sectors which aren't really going anyway.
Well I don't. Yes these sectors are healthy. But manufacturing is shrinking in terms of absolute numbers of employees, much less relative to the size of the populations. And the C average (about 50th percentile) high school graduate can no longer get the current manufacturing jobs like they could from 1945 through 1980. But we still generate these people at similar rates as before.
I still think this is a transitory effect caused by increased global trade and significant price differences. As those price differences level out, so will this problem. As I said, this isn't a zero sum game, and we've plenty of reference examples of economies dealing with the global market reasonably effectively and looking after the people caught in the mess better than the UK and US have over the last 30 years.
We're not going to stop generating people, but I think we need to be smarter about what we do with them. Which is another reason why I think that 'the market will provide' strategies are doomed to fail people.
If you have the choice to be a C grade student dumped into the labour pool of a developed country - would you do it in the US, UK or Germany?
Synchronicity Dept.: Amazon and the estate of Ian Fleming have just announced a deal for North American rights to the Bond books that puts front-and-center many of the issues discussed here.
Details: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57415756-93/james-bond-a-la-amazon-double-standard-for-007/
Really an excellent discussion throughout this session -- very high ratio of insight and idea to rant and cant.
Depends on what ancillary benefits are being offered.
$30,000 a year for 40 hours a week, for 46 weeks of labour a year sucks quite a bit. It sucks a little less if it includes health care (I'm American so this is by no means a given and something we think about when job offers come up).
$50,000 a year for 60 hours a week, for 50 weeks of labour a year is close to what I had at my last day job (academic librarian -- though after deducting the cost for health Care insurance and taxes, I was actually taking home just under $40K).
If the job were something comprable to my librarian position, though I was taking home 50K after HC and taxes, that would be better than the 30K job, because although I would be working more, I'd have HC and be bringing more home.
Now if that 30K job were me self-employed as a writer, it would be a lot more attractive, because I would be doing what I truly wanted, would be my own boss and would be making a living. Even if it meant paying out of pocket for HC, it'd be worth it.
Assume absolutely no benefits, since as a self-employed writer that's precisely what you get, and although I don't know the details, I've seen articles by US based writers that indicate the health care insurance costs are very very far from non-trivial (no matter how much job satisfaction you're getting).
True, but let's not go there - the rants about the US health care system don't need to be repeated.
It occurs to me that editors and their associated services such as cover design become more useful as the author becomes more successful. The ones who get ejected early on in the slush pile weeding wouldn't be helped anyway, and the aspiring capable authors don't have a track record to make them attractive to editors; they might as well try self-publishing. It's the ones who have a few salable books in that will most benefit from a publishing house able to do something with their product. The midlist authors with established careers could venture out on their own but a wise publisher wouldn't want to give them cause - they could just go on to another publisher.
It's too early to tell if this will last, but I don't think there's ever been a best-seller or other hugely popular work that didn't come through the traditional publishing route. The advantages of professional advertising are so great that I think any such marketplace success is beyond the alternative routes for the foreseeable future.
Dave the Proc @ 551 NO I would like to know who said that
Robin Munn @ 559 So the TesBaggers Are (maybe) not funded by the Kochs? Do they REALLY realise what no guvmint would mean? In terms of ppublic servid=ces? Or don't you have those in the glorious USSA?
Erm genuine grassroots convictions - like evangelical christianty, oh dearie dearie me ...... BRAIN -> ENGAGE!
damn, i never heard of this site but you have 600+ freaking comments on one post???
i got here trying to search on why there are really no significant discounts in buying the ebook vs the print edition of any book in particular on Amazon (or i would guess any other site for that matter) as it seems to me there should be at the very least a 50% discount when you consider they don't have to print or ship or stock or return any of these ebooks.
my guess is that others will be pi$$ed off like i am and decide that they really don't care too much if the same thing happens to books that happened to music, i.e. people all over the world "share" aka steal whatever they like until the price comes way way down into more reasonable territory.
is Amazon responsible for this pricing? i doubt it. more likely the book publishers, who see themselves as unecessary as the old music studios.
Really?? You are comparing Kindle's lock-in and ebooks DRM with the GPL? You must be joking!
Greg, please strive for more coherence.
Greg: Check out #128 above, in this thread.
Enjoy!
Frank.
Joe, if you read the entire thread and check out some links on it and on this blog, you can see that actually e-books are not so much cheaper, although we might differ on the definition of 'significant'.
Germany
Based on very incomplete information. The UK seems (from what little I read about it over here) to be producing kids similar to the US in terms of no skills and no plans for college. Germany seems to have a rational education system for producing knowledgeable production workers. As long as you are OK with your kids future path being determined at around age 12 or so.
After spending 15 years pushing my kids through what is rated as a top level US public school education I'm not at all optimistic things over here will get better before they get worse. The top 20th percentile are handled somewhat OK. They are mostly preped for college and not ignored. Then next 30th down sort do OK. Especially if their parents get involved and force the system to deal with them. The bottom half are in my thoughts abandoned to a life of flipping burgers or doing brake jobs till they retire or drop.
although I don't know the details, I've seen articles by US based writers that indicate the health care insurance costs are very very far from non-trivial
$5k to $10k per year depending on age and family status and how big of a deductible you want to live with. Plus a few thousand other choices. But going for something like a $5k deductible can cut your premiums in half. Which moves you from a health care plan to the real definition of insurance.
Which is why many of us self employed types would have to think long and hard if we didn't have a spouse with a medical plan.
It all depends what you mean by dying from starvation.
During the great depression in the US you had thousands of persons dying from malnutrition-induced diseases (like pellagra, rickets and others) before they could ever get a chance to die from "true" immediate starvation like the Inuit in Canada's far North in the 1950s.
The disease-causing malnutrition was induced by economic conditions which made it impossible for those US citizens to go on eating their traditional diets.
Joe: been here before. Read this first: how books are made. Hint: making ebooks is not as cheap as you expect, because the physical components of paper books are virtually free: the real expenses lie elsewhere.
David: the inability of the UK and US to organise their affairs sensibly is really a symptom of the problem I alluded to. I don't think this has anything to do with people not wanting to buy what is made in either country - the dominates a lot of fields and I expect it to continue to do so, just as the UK does...
We started doing certain things differently in the 1980s, and we're paying the price for that now.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2009/db2009064_666715.htm
"Medical problems caused 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007, according to a study by Harvard researchers. And in a finding that surprised even the researchers, 78% of those filers had medical insurance at the start of their illness, including 60.3% who had private coverage, not Medicare or Medicaid."
No I'm not joking. The legal basis for the licence is identical, the terms of the license are different but the legal basis is identical. The GPL uses copyright law to prevent code written under it from being used in any derived work used if you are going to use copyright to restrict how your work is distributed and used it is rather hypocritical to complain when other people use their copyright to impose different restrictions on how their work is distributed.
I’m talking about another kind of human factor paws4thot @ 539! I’m not saying that the cover will automatically be the only factor in the decision to buy. I’m saying that the cover is the first factor to come in play in a browsing and selection process, for the majority of a normal human population. In the absence of cues from other senses, that is to say in the absence of tactile and other clues found in a 3D book store, the visual element becomes all the more important.
Also, the act of reading involves other brain functions that come in play after the visual recognition of simpler shapes and colors. A normal human brain (which means that I’m not talking about computer programmers here) will see everything about the book cover first, and even reject it automatically, unthinkingly, before getting to read the words that are on it. Sure, the placement of the title and of the author’s name is absolutely crucial, and so is the selection of the font and its size. In fact an editor will sometimes have a third pro involved, a cover designer, in addition to the art director and the freelance artist. But your brain gets to that great title and that wonderful author’s name after it has caught on to the colors and shapes of the cover, be it ever so humble.
And speaking of humble covers (Robert Sneddon @554), sure you can paint your covers (digital or not) all in yellow with absolutely no illustration on it, like Gollancz did, and boy it really will stand out if all the other covers around have complex drawings with subtle colors. But it’s like shouting in a quiet coffee house. Soon enough the others start talking louder, a lot louder and even shouting too, with other colors. So, Gollancz had to stop shouting at one point. But now they’ve started doing so again in the digital realm. Maybe they don’t care about giving each title an identity and are happy as long as they establish their own single visual identity as a publisher?
And Yes, Greg Tingey @ 549, yes I am quite well aware of Chris Foss and his imitators. From a personal point of view his « sudden » appearance on book covers back in the 70s was quite a traumatic experience. At the time I was used to covers with either a very expressionist style, (which left a lot to my freewheeling imagination) or to covers with a very realistic style, in the Chesley Bonestell tradition. Chris Foss did neither of those. I was horrified by his use of colors, orthogonal shapes and whatnot. He and his imitators did to SF cover art what Picasso and the other cubists and Dadaists did to classical painting and the subtle approach of the « pointilistes ».
But looking back (40 years after that 70s trauma) at a page full of Google image search thumbnails of Chris Foss illustrations I can see quite a few that look like « traditional » SF illustrations.
In contrast with those Chris Foss offerings come on and go take a look at the cover French editors gave to “Aube d’Acier”, a novel by monsieur Charles Stross:
http://www.maasbiolab.net/stross-charlesaube-d-acier-p3305/
With that, ahem,” interesting” French-market rendition of Rachel Mansour in mind, tell me if you think that some of those Foss covers now look a bit more closer to the contents of their novels.
And finally, speaking of foreign editions with translations involved, self-publishing authors (or thos who think that the future should belong to self publishing authors working through Amazon) should remember that there are foreign markets out there and both the traditional agents and the traditional publishing houses are involved, are crucial in getting their books to those markets. Again more work involved if you somehow think that you can / must / should avoid agents and publishers.
Daveon,
I'm not exactly sure how you've done your maths, and a 600 post long single thread is not the place to start trading spreadsheets, but I think you've put certain costs on the 'Charlie has to pay' side, that would actually be in the other chunk under the author-centric ebook model.
If I'm reading you assumptions right, the actual take home for Charlie (minus HMRC) would be $240k vs $50k.
As I'll point out again, if wholesale/retail elements collapse to 10% of the gross in an ebook world, rather than 60% is dead trees - then there is 50% of the gross that can be apportioned to author/price cuts/etc. even if nothing else changes.
If a reader knows who Charles Stross is and likes his work? Sure, your point holds.
If a reader doesn't know who Our Host is? Doesn't know what Rule 34 means? (A pretty geekly piece of knowledge, you have to admit.) Then yeah, I'd easily believe they'd buy a more professional-looking cover over something that looks like it was slapped together by a kid with no taste.
Because covers are, first and foremost, sales tools. They're there to draw a casual browser's attention to a book, and get them interested enough to read the blurb, maybe a few pages. (And that, in answer to another comment upthread, is why good-looking covers are important even if they don't show to best advantage on an e-ink display; they're trying to draw you in when you're browsing, before the book ever gets to the e-reader. With the increasing presence of color buying/reading options - smartphones, the Kindle Fire/Nook Color, general-purpose tablets - I'd argue good covers are getting more important in the e-book domain, not less.)
You'll notice how generic/house brands have taken this lesson to heart over the last few years; that block-type-on-yellow-background label is seen a lot less frequently these days, and house brands like Best Choice or Target's Archer Farms often look more tasteful than the big name brands.
And to answer a response I can see coming - no, I don't believe website sales tools replace the need for covers. I don't put any faith in review systems; they're too easily gamed by astroturfing, all too readily attract people wanting to make political statements about some peripheral aspect of the book instead of reviewing the actual content, and frankly contain way too many loudmouth reviews that don't bother to respect the English language. And at least for me, the recommendation engines I've seen get it right less than a third of the time.
Try 15-20K for a family of four. My family was paying $1600 a month until recently for a plan with high deductibles. In the health care miracle state of Massachusetts no less.
Cover art:
I can't say I ever bought a book because of its cover art. However, I've put a large number of them back on the shelf because the cover art was ugly, poorly done, stupid, or more than one of the above.
As a "sales tool", cover art is often more of a sales loser.
Same goes for when I look at the back of the book for the cover blurb and find there's just a giant picture of someone (probably the author) there. Back on the shelf. Or I open the cover to read the inside blurb, and there's nothing but a bunch of one-line (or one-word) comments attributed to "The Scunthorpe Fishwrap-Cageliner" or "Hooterville Bimonthly Hog and Crawdad Report". Hmm, the publisher couldn't be bothered to tell me what the book might be about? Back on the shelf.
And finally, I'm less inclined to purchase a book if it has the author's name in GIANT LETTERS on the spine and cover, even if it's an author with a pretty good track record. It makes me wonder if the book is a turkey, so they're hoping I'll snag it on author appeal.
I'll also note something else I haven't seen pop up in the comments so far. Charlie mentioned that going to self-publishing would cut his writing output in half, and several self-pub advocates have popped up to question his conclusions or ask if he wouldn't be financially better-off even if his output dropped by 50%. I want to ask - what about the readers?
As a reader, I very selfishly want my favorite authors to spending their work hours cranking out more books - not acting as a business manager. Even if you grant that editing services, layout/cover design, website/e-commerce management, promotion, etc. etc. can be contracted out, the author still has to take time away from his writing to play project manager and get all of these jobs organized, scheduled, and brought through to a conclusion. I've played project manager before, and it ain't simple, it ain't easy, and often it's a major timesink. If my favorite authors' book production gets cut in half, so does the number of books I get to read from them, and I don't look forward to that prospect at all.
If we want to talk in classical economic terms, that defines my 'enlightened self-interest.' And I'm genuinely surprised that none of the self-pub advocates seem to address this as a serious issue. Is it just not on the radar? Is it viewed as an unavoidable cost of doing business in the Brave New World? Do they think it'll be balanced out by lower prices to the reader? (Color me skeptical.) Do they just believe so strongly in the self-pub cause that they're willing to sacrifice having more goodies to read? I'm honestly curious.
Switching back to the authors' POV, I am very sympathetic to the ones who've stated their dislike for putting in all the extra work of running a self-pub business. After being downsized in mid-2007, I've spent the last 4+ years as an independent developer, but at the start of this year I gave it up to work for a development firm. Because my strength and my joy is in coding, not self-promotion or tracking down new work or any of the other things I had to do as an independent consultant. It's very easy for me to see why an author would feel the same way.
There's an anecdotal edge to this as well for me. A friend of mine is a very good artist, and tried to make her living selling prints at SF cons and Renfests for many years. But in the end, after a decade of trying to support herself that way, she had to give up and take a job painting backgrounds for Silver Dollar City. Needless to say, it's been a lot harder to get new art from her since then...
Try 15-20K for a family of four. My family was paying $1600 a month until recently for a plan with high deductibles. ...Massachusetts...
I can believe it. In Mass. Likely also in NJ and RI and similar. But things are not quite that bad everywhere else. Applying anything about insurance of any kind in Mass. to the rest of the country is like applying horse industry in Kentucky to the rest of the country. (Where I grew up.) They are both outliers for the specific situation.
I did design work on insurance systems in the 80s. Mass was one of those states where, well let's just say, things were different.
Two things Travis,
First, from a purely selfish perspective I think Charlie should be fitted with thumbscrews, but on his big toes. For every week he didn't produce a sequel to Iron Sunrise, the screw gets another turn. Charlie might not like those terms though...
Second, the model presented doesn't say Charlie should have to do it all himself, and that he's perfectly at liberty to sub whatever elements he fancies (same as anyone). Offload some copyediting, cover design, promotion, accountancy, etc. and he gets to spend exactly the same amount of time not writing the Iron Sunrise sequel. The difference is, with the non-typical, author-centric, model being presented, he maintains control and the majority of the profits - and nobody has a gatekeeper/rent seeker limitation on that control.
That shift is mediated by the revolutionary shift: paper > eBooks, which rewrites many of the past assumptions (though probably not all, people are still reading less).
I think I know a lot about odd ball ecom. What we have is not very good and never has been. Lets talk about it on a ecom board and stick to other thinks on boards like this one
Ian:
As I'll point out again, if wholesale/retail elements collapse to 10% of the gross in an ebook world, rather than 60% is dead trees - then there is 50% of the gross that can be apportioned to author/price cuts/etc. even if nothing else changes.
Except, we've established the numbers DON'T collapse like that.
How ever you dice the e-book world, the distribution channel takes 30% - so before you look at ANY author take, you're at 70% of the revenues.
When I'm bidding services work, I add 20% for Project Management and 10% for QA and a 10-15% contingency, depending on what I think the complexity of the work is. I don't see how having the author manage all of this and outsource QA will be all that different. I've done professional services projects for more than a decade and those numbers really haven't changed much.
That takes another 20% - 45% off the remainder... the Project Management overhead worries me the most as, for the author that's unproductive time.
That's without factoring his accounting costs, which will be much higher now, and his personal travel for events which currently his publisher will be picking up for promotional events.
However I look at these numbers, with a critical business eye, given the option of taking 10% of the current model, or 70% of a self publishing one, the 10% looks pretty damn good.
he maintains control and the majority of the profits
NO!!!! NO HE DOES NOT!
He maintains control of the majority of his revenues.
Revenues are NOT profits.
The income from selling a book is a revenue. Your profit, i.e. your income is your revenues, less your cost of sales (30% for Amazon), less your operating costs (copy editors, lost production time in terms of hours of labour, editors, travel, PR, art, etc...)
What ever is LEFT from that is profit.
Good lord! This is very very basic business stuff guys!
How about an incentive prize instead? We set up a big plexiglass box in an editor's office, into which people are allowed to place cash, beer, and cat toys. When Charlie delivers a manuscript the box is unlocked and he takes home the loot. grin
I was trying to be at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek about the commentary, given the number of off-topic politico-economic posts being tossed around the thread, but I obviously failed that part of it. :( That said, I'm perfectly sincere in saying that I'd much rather see Charlie writing instead of playing phone tag with an editor he hired, trying to get the artist to meet deadline, or IM'ing his hosting provider to find out why the shopping cart isn't working. Especially since he's said repeatedly that this is what he prefers!
Because I was also quite sincere when I argued that subcontracting isn't magic, either. Sure, you can talk about interviewing and picking editors, finding an artist yourself, contracting layout and formatting, and on and on - but that still takes time out of your writing day, because now you're the one stuck coordinating everything and making sure the trains run on time. Why is this so difficult to understand? As I said, I've had to play project manager before; it's not trivial, it's often not fun, and it doesn't go away by waving the magic wand of 'you can just sub that out!'
Something that really bugs me about the attitude in several of the self-pub posts is the insistence that authors should do things their way, in the face of repeated statements by authors themselves that they are quite aware of the issues being raised and that they don't agree and don't want to take on those burdens. After the fifth or sixth post repeating the same arguments without apparently even listening to the rebuttals, it starts to come across as arrogant and condescending - that the authors are too hidebound/pick-your-derogative-adjective to recognize what's good for them.
So, since the posts didn't seem to respect or care about what the authors said they want, I decided to present a rational (if tongue-in-cheek) argument for why the proposition is bad for the reader; if they don't care when the author says they don't want to put in all that extra work, maybe they'd care about losing books they could be reading?
Like an advance Scott :)
It's only hypocritical if one's aim is to abrogate an author's right to control publication. That isn't what the Free Software movement is about.
The goal is to preserve user freedom. That copyright law makes it possible to block as well as support that goal does not destroy its value in furthering that goal.
The GPL uses copyright law to prevent code written under it from being used in any derived work used if you are going to use copyright to restrict how your work is distributed and used it is rather hypocritical...
Except that DRM is about restricting the free use of something; the GPL is about making it freely available for reuse. Perhaps you missed the point about "what happens if you use GPL code as part of your product" - hint: the penalty is having to open-source it. Hence the occasional education sessions at my place of work, and the scarily large indemnities demanded by some of our clients who are worried that a supplier screwup will mean that they have to (say) open-source their IP crown jewels (maybe, the entire code base for a smartphone, or a base station, or a ... You get the idea)
Mr Stallman's position may be an interesting contrast, but I wouldn't call it hypocrisy.
I was going to write something witty, revealing a deep insight into the problems of ebooks, why Amazon is dangerous, and proposing a solution which the whole world immediately sees as the only possible answer.
We need Charlie, the author, spending his working time writing books.
Charlie needs us, the readers, spending our leisure time reading his books.
Somehow, we have to connect a large number of authors with a large number of readers, and the self-publishing, self-distributing, models of the book business, which ebooks make possible, are on a head-on collision course with Dunbar's number.
There's a place for something such as Amazon, but it controls too much of the market—how can a free market exist without competing buyers and sellers dealing in the same goods1—and the legal requirements corporations are subject to push in the direction of greed and sociopathy.
I find myself wondering if the capitalist ideals of the late 20th century are appropriate to the internet age of the 21st. Do we need a different way of handling the necessary large organisations, such as Amazon and the internet itself, which are necessary?
Words such as "nationalisation" have ugly associations with mis-managed industries. Besides, Amazon is multi-national, and it couldn't work. I'm also reluctant to trust governments with that sort of power.
My personal bias is towards some sort of collective ownership, by readers and authors alike. Don't run away, I know is sounds like something from the writings of Marx or Kropotkin, it's something that has been used, and has worked well, until governments have acted to break the systems. It is a concept that seemed to be equally hated by the Communists and Fascists in the 1930s, and was targeted by the Capitalists of the last three decades. With enemies like that, it must be a good idea.
1 Books are not interchangeable. For there to be a market, the traders in a market must be able to sell the same goods. I can go to several places to buy a paperback edition of a particular text. If I want an ebook, too often there is only one source for the product.
I don't know... to me it sounds like the current publishing model :/
ΟΚ then. It's obvious to me that due to sulf-incurred blindness, you fail to understand that DRM FORBIDS the free distribution of information, while the GPL FORCES the free distribution of information. Even if you don't agree with the GPL for some reason - and I've read some logical arguments against it over the years - this comparison has no foot in reality.
Personally, being able to rent a server, install the LAMP stack and make a living out of it, being free to use GNU tools for the job with the only rule that I have to give away the code if I install my utilities on a client's machine strikes me as somewhat different than being unable to give a book I just bought to my girlfriend so she can read it on her favourite reading device. You need a reality check.
Sorry Daveon, but your 30%+ is in a world where you let an apple et al, charge that level. You didn't think the apple rake off was at cost, did you? 30% makes them oodles of profit.
We we were talking about was a different model, so you may like to reconsider what 'has been established'.
...he maintains control and the majority of the profits
You may like to check your reading comprehension. I don't think that sentence says what you think it says.
Just as an aside, we seem to be getting to the point of diminishing returns. People are ignoring the statements that have been made that say this isn't the 'yea olde worlde' self publishing and concentrating on 'it can't possibly be done', almost as a matter of faith. Well, from my perspective of the market and it's changes, the status quo isn't likely to be an option. Those cold winds are blowing and things will change - either with your involvement, or by blowing your roof away.
Surely that's the take home from Charlie's original opinion piece?
Er, my description of "chrome yellow with name and title in sans-serif font" is a description of the famous Gollancz SF cover design, which can be spotted from 2 stacks away in a large lending library. GOTCHA!!
(and @Robert Sneddon #555)
And of course it can also be a proper name (I'm just off to the Crown for a swift half)...
(tries to take pedant hat off, fails)
I think that Charlie, Robert and I had all agreed that we were making different angles of the same point; that certain words (and/or the usage of them and contractions of them) is a context-sensitive activity that can't be readily computer automated short of a true AI (Ainiko class or above).
I don't have any problem with you choosing tom use the GPL. I do have a problem with you using the GPL and then complaining that other people choose to release stuff under different licence terms. You are using exactly the same piece of law to fulfil your purpose. If you were to place your work in the public domain and disclaim all copyright you would be unable to restrict how the code was used, including use in closed source.
If you want to allow another person to read you can lend them the device, that doesn't involve copyright as there is no duplication. Which is what would happen if you lent them a print book. You can also have multiple devices linked to a single account so you could do that and that doesn't even lose you access.
Not having some form of copyright protection for foreigners led in the nineteenth century to very large scale commercial piracy in the US, at the margin this would have led to several writers being unable to make a living as they were not getting royalties from a major market.
The publishing industry is naturally concerned that if piracy became accepted then not being required to pay writers would reduce the supply. As books would then be a public good and the market chronically under supplies public goods. In a market economy one function of the state is to turn common and pubic goods into private and club goods.
Since I read Charlie's blog post -- and more so when the comments started flooding in, and then even more so when the inevitable "self-publishing will save all" comments started showing up -- I have been meaning to hunt out Cat Valente's guest-blog of a few months ago on publishing (can be found at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/02/work-is-never-over-on-publishi.html).
The whole thing is worth a read, or re-read if you caught it the first time, but I also picked out a few quotes I thought were more germaine to this discussion.
First, this gives a flavour of why Cat is worth listening to about publishing:
So here's some data points. In seven and a half years in the game, I have published five novels with indie presses, one with a micropress, six with New York presses (Bantam, Tor, and Feiwel and Friends), and two serial novels. Two collections with indie presses, five poetry collections with micro or small presses, a standalone hardback novella with a regional science fiction association, and one collection self-published via Kindle and Lulu.
There is this wonderful summation of Amazon and self-publishing, and what they really mean to an aspiring (or even established) author:
Amazon is and should be seen by everyone who lists their books with them not as a savior but as a brute beast that you can strap yourself to for the present, but never forget that they can trample you, and you may want to leave a knot or two lose for a quick escape ... Self-publishing has always been hailed as the great equalizer, and it has always had these exact drawbacks: uneven quality, overweening quantity, low profit margins for authors, and poor packaging.
And these three separate quotes, for me, illustrate best the "secret" of writing well and successfully:
Is "the secret" to publish with Tor or Orbit or Bantam or DAW? Is it to put a children's book on your website and not even bother to list it in the Kindle marketplace because that's a lot of work (actual reason for Fairyland not serializing on the Kindle)? Is it to publish with WSFA? No, because those were all very specific circumstances, and if you ask any writer, you will find that very specific circumstances, impossible to manufacture, predict, and often repeat, govern just about every success story.
You simply cannot know what, when you are a working writer, will take off and what will flop. You do not know it anymore now that ebooks are on the rise than you did before. The ebook marketplace is the slushpile, and it is just as long a shot to be plucked out of it as it ever was.
No one wants to hear there is no secret, it's luck, it's writing something people respond to, it's effort and time and work.
(Also, go look up some of Cat's other guest-blogs if you haven't read them before, they're well worth the time!)
You lend me your Kindle; You then realise that you've not just lent me $title but every book you have on Kindle. See the difference now?
It is also used for "crown glass", an early process for making a flat sheet of glass that involved blowing a big globe then opening it out at one end. Once the opening out was complete it looked a bit like a crown. It was then heated and flattened out over a long time in a furnace before being allowed to cool. The flat thinner outer sections gave the good quality glass, the round inner part where the pontil was attached was wrinkled and sometimes called the bullseye. This was sold cheap hence the fashion for windows with wrinkled circles of glass in it, aping the cheap windows of a couple of centuries before.
Dammit! I just posted a nice long comment with some wonderful quotes from Cat Valente's guest-post back in February of this year, where she discussed her experiences in publishing -- stupidly I also linked back to the article, and into limbo went my post
I'd been meaning to go back and re-read the article since Charlie posted this latest blog entry, and I won't re-produce my whole missing post again, in the hope that it will turn up; but I will just suggest that anyone with an interest in publishing, in all its flavours, should go read or re-read now.
The quote from Cat's article I thought made the best comment on the current Amazon-centric topic (with an aside about self-publishing) is as follows:
Amazon is and should be seen by everyone who lists their books with them not as a savior but as a brute beast that you can strap yourself to for the present, but never forget that they can trample you, and you may want to leave a knot or two lose for a quick escape ... Self-publishing has always been hailed as the great equalizer, and it has always had these exact drawbacks: uneven quality, overweening quantity, low profit margins for authors, and poor packaging.
If you want to allow another person to read you can lend them the device, that doesn't involve copyright as there is no duplication. Which is what would happen if you lent them a print book. You can also have multiple devices linked to a single account so you could do that and that doesn't even lose you access.
Except that it's not like lending a book but like lending your library. This leaves you without anything to read (which is a problem if your friend is a slow reader) and without anything to lend others if you so choose. Also when I lend books to friends I have an expectation that I might not see it for a while because they may be too busy to read it or we don't see each other (a few friends I lend to live far away and we infrequently meet physically).
Long ago [1942-1945] George O. Smith wrote a series of short stories collected into the volume "Venus Equilateral." In the last story, a group of engineers were working on a matter transmitter and realized they had also created a matter duplicator.
Part of the story takes place in a courtroom, where the court is trying to get a handle on the value of originality - if you can copy an Old Master painting for a few cents, in such a way that it cannot be distinguished from the pattern, how and why does it affect the value of the original? Why should you make more than one of anything, and how do you make any money from it?
Basically, the same problem that the entertainment industry has run into twice (the VCR and torrents), the software industry (remember key disks and dongles?) and now the publishing industry is facing.
Smith didn't have an answer, but he did a pretty good job of exploring the problem. And it's a pretty good book in the hardcore tech-geek SF subgenre to boot.
@660: Also when I lend books to friends I have an expectation that I might not see it for a while
--
"Only your friends steal books." - G. Harry Stine
Just think of the GPL as IP judo - using copyright's strengths against it. ",)
Coming in late (I slept in) but:
I'd just like to add that I'm already a self-employed businessman who has to deal with more paperwork than he's terribly happy with (HMRC get upset if you stop filing tax returns, for one thing).
I also come from a line of people who almost all either ran businesses or were self employed (apart from the doctor who became a cabinet minister in the 1960s). I've grown up with the run-your-own-business thing in the blood.
If I thought for a split second that I could take in enough extra profits to justify the headaches involved in becoming my own publisher, I would do so. But right now I'd have to work about 50% harder in order to bring in maybe 10-20% more money ... and I'm earning a comfortable living at my current level.
Finally, as a meta-comment: I'm 47, which is too damn old to go do the start-up death march routine again. I'd like to live long enough to reach semi-retirement, by which I mean slowing down and emitting maybe one book every 2-3 years when I'm in my 70's. Which might not sound like much, but if I work myself into an early grave in my early 50s that's a lot of novels I won't get to write. Right?
TL;DR: I firmly believe that we work to live, not live to work. The "live to work" mentality is a pernicious Christian puritan shibboleth that ruins lives. It also decreases productivity in the long run, which is why German workers -- with 10 weeks' paid vacation a year -- outproduce American workers overall.
With the kindle lending the actual device doesn't in fact lose you access to the books, as you can have multiple devices linked to a single account. Either having multiple kindles or several third party devices running the kindle software. It's more like giving a friend free shared access to your library than lending.
The thing is that in lending a print book you are lending the text and the only device on which you can view it. Nothing in the DRM prevents you from lending in the same way you do a print book, it does prevent you from doing something that is effectively impossible with a print book. If you were to lend somebody a short story collection or omnibus even if they only wanted to read one story you would be unable to read any of them until the book was returned. An ebook reader is essentially a custom compiled single volume omnibus, if you were to have several books re bound in a single volume then you would not be able to lend just one of the books.
"German workers -- with 10 weeks' paid vacation a year -- outproduce American workers overall."
Now that's a fascinating statistic, do you have a source link for it? I'd love to know more about how they came up with it, how it compares to other nations, and whether there are other cultural elements that impact it.
Start here, then follow the links. Yes, it's suggested there's a cultural element -- fewer meetings, more emphasis on management/labour consensus, among other things -- but there's definitely a tendency in the English-speaking nations to confuse hours spent at work with actual productivity.
With the kindle lending the actual device doesn't in fact lose you access to the books, as you can have multiple devices linked to a single account. Either having multiple kindles or several third party devices running the kindle software. It's more like giving a friend free shared access to your library than lending.
As far as I am aware a kindle account can only be registered to three devices. That hardly makes it the simple solution that you seem to make it out to be.
Also the problem (from a publisher/retailer point of view) with giving someone access to a shared library is that in the digital age there isn't much to stop me giving strangers from accross the internet access. The only solution I can think of within the scope of what we are talking about (i.e. for the moment I will play devils advocate and go along with the idea that some sort of DRM needs to be used) is to have it set so that each item you buy can be given access to someone else but only one person at a time. So if I want to lend my friend an ebook I have I simply press a button on my ebook, type in his email address/phone number/kindle account number etc and a message pops up on his screen saying he has access to that book. If I want to lend it to someone else I have to recind his access.
An ebook reader is essentially a custom compiled single volume omnibus, if you were to have several books re bound in a single volume then you would not be able to lend just one of the books.
Obviously...what's your point?
My kindle account is active on four devices (PC, phone, ipad, kindle) without issue; I don't believe there's a limit for the account, though some books have extra licensing conditions that they can only be in the memory of M devices at a time.
My Kindle account is active on: two Kindles (Keyboard 3rd gen, Kindle Fire), two Macs, a Viliv N5, an iPhone and an iPad. For a total of seven Kindle readers.
The terms are not nearly so restrictive, from Amazon's FAQ:
Content purchased from the Kindle Store can be downloaded to your Kindle, Android, iPhone, iPad or iPod touch as long as you have registered the device to the Amazon.co.uk account that purchased the Kindle content. There is no limit to the number of times a title can be downloaded to a registered device, but there may be limits on the number of devices (usually six) that can simultaneously use a single book.
Basically there is no particular limit on the number of devices you can connect to an account (I dare say Amazon wouldn't be too happy if you had a few hundred, that might be considered taking the piss), the specific licence may limit on the number of devices an ebook can be simultaneously installed on.
My point is that with an ebook, even with DRM, you have the same lending rights you do with a print book, even if the physical nature of the device make it less convenient to actually do so.
Handling lending individual ebooks in some way would require either negotiation of contract terms with the rights holder or some sort of legislative action to establish some standard contract terms.
I'd just like to add that I'm already a self-employed businessman who has to deal with more paperwork than he's terribly happy with
Reading the comments here I guess it is true on both sides of the big pond. Most all people who have worked for a paycheck and not been the ones signing the checks for their own business accounts don't understand just how much overhead is hiding behind the curtain. In the US it costs something like double paycheck costs AT A MINIMUM to carry an employee. And that's for a low wage unskilled food server at a fast food joint. For tech employees and others it can easily be 3 or 4 times paycheck wages (gross not net) and more depending on the job.
And much of that cost comes from doing what seems like mundane trivial tasks. Filing taxes. Paying bills. Billing clients. Negotiating contracts. Marketing. Whatever. These all take time and either you pay for them in time or cash or trade.
TANSTAAFL
it's suggested there's a cultural element -- fewer meetings, more emphasis on management/labour consensus,
Interesting read. And I don't doubt that Germans might be/are more productive.
But there's a lot more going on here than "Puritan work ethic".
The article also touched on less social time during work and more get it done then leave in Germany. In the US that will definitely get you off of any "great places to work" lists. And more than likely attacked by the D's as an evil R (whether true or not) as a ruthless task master.
I've worked in both environments. I tend to prefer the German model as breifly described. Especially when I had a door I could close to get work done.
And we could have a entire month of threads about union and management. The German way I might support. The US way of fist fighting to come to an armistice between contracts is just plain stupid.
Disintermediation
Is there a way to stop this. I think no. Do we need rules yes. But not rules that stop the process keep it "fair". And I hate that word when written into laws as it can be and will be used and abused by all sides. Amazon's abuse of the sales tax situation in the US strikes me as something that should have been addressed over a decade ago. And from what I read here they are playing similar games in the EU.
History of some US situations.
A&P. They basically drove a bulldozer through the food selling business throughout the middle of the last century. There were all kinds of yelling about them not playing fair and destroying small businesses. Some states and cities even did things like passing laws to prevent grocers from buying from wholesalers more than X miles from the store to try and stop A&P. But A&P suceed because their way was so much more efficient. But eventually A&P took their own past as the only way to do things and got destroyed themselves by Kroger and it's cousins. Bigger stores and better customer experiences. On a side note, anyone else here remember Green Stamps? These were the precursor to loyalty cars. Collect the stamps at checkout and redeem for stuff at the Green Stamp store.
Sears / KMart / Walmart Sears managed to live next to smaller stores for many decades. And they didn't eliminate general stores in small communities. KMart started doing that in the 60s and 70s. But KMart was so focused on Sears that the year they overtook Sears, Walmart overtook both of them. In my opinion what allowed Walmart and KMart to obliterate the smaller stores was better roads and autos for people who didn't live in city centers. A one hour drive you expect to make with no trouble is much more likely to happen than a 3 hour drive where you almost have to plan for a flat tire or such.
B&N/Borders/Amazon
Borders and B&N strike me as the A&P of the current age. They obliterated the competition but thought that was the end of it. Amazon came along and made use of the better roads (Internet) to show them there was another way.
Ian: If you think that you can bypass Apple and Amazon have at it! I think you're showing an astonishing degree of naivete myself.
Profits are what you get to keep ONCE you have paid for everything, and that includes covering your own income.
It's that simple. Wishing away inconvenient numbers in your P&L Statement doesn't alter the numbers. We have several authors here saying they don't want the extra work for a minimal increase in business, we have self-published authors taking publishing deals rather than keeping at it...
Despite that your entire line seems to be that publishing is broken and everybody will be better off? Look at the facts and evidence will you and run the numbers conservatively rather than looking for ways to add them up to eleventy!
After reading all this, I'm mostly in agreement with Charlie. However, I suspect that some of the issues he's concerned with will become old hat after awhile. The first book under the new system (if he joined a new system) would take twice the time. After that I suspect he'd produce 1.6 books a year or some such. Nonetheless, that's one less book every two years, not counting the initial investment of losing a book, so this WOULD NOT be a good thing.
As a rule of thumb, the average fully loaded cost for an engineer in the US onshore tech industry is about $175,000 a year - that holds up pretty well for Microsoft and Amazon anyway.
And, to be clear, that's SALARY + PAYROLL RELATED TAX + MARGIN to cover all the other business operations.
I probably spend, or should spend, 5-10 hours a week on our admin (for currently a 5 person startup) and I pay a book-keeper for 10-20 hours a month to do the main paperwork and reconcile the books, then I pay a CPA a four figure amount to actually do the tax return and answer questions, mostly, about the collection and management of sales taxes.
One of the reasons why people are prepared to put up with the Apple and Amazon tax is that for their 30%, they administer the sales tax. It makes a huge difference.
People are ignoring the statements that have been made that say this isn't the 'yea olde worlde' self publishing and concentrating on 'it can't possibly be done', almost as a matter of faith.
No, not as a matter of faith and certainly that it can't possibly be done.
What I and Charlie and quite a few others here have said, is, yes, it can be done, but if you run the actual numbers, the return for the effort makes it not worth doing.
It's a pure business decision at the end of the day.
Charles Stross is better off under the current model than he would be self publishing.
Now, if you're not in the current model, self publishing this way might be a super way to get started. But the very fact that people who have started doing it themselves but then take publishing deals with traditional publishers, citing the amount of work they have to do that isn't writing, should suggest to you that the model you're using doesn't work.
As I said. Do the numbers. I have, and Charlie seems to. Working a LOT more on non-writing for a marginal return on profit is daft and a poor use of his time.
There may be a case made somewhere in here for micropublishers, who do "all the other stuff" from author to print (or ebook) ready but don't do printing, instead either only distributing ebooks or doing POD via one of those entities.
I.e., do the editing, the covers, the layout, the PR (even a minimized project needs some ad placement, etc). All the stuff that Charlie and Cat don't want to do, while they get on with writing.
Downside is that they probably won't have the capitalization to pre-fund projects (author advances), though one could hypothesize setups that did. Problem with micro-advances is that a few screw ups in a row and it's done as a business, whereas big publishers are operating statistically across a year and can manage any reasonable number of flops as long as the averages are ok.
For authors with another cashflow or money in the bank it might do fine. Might be a great first-novel-publisher venue, for people who are writing now without a contract (or agent, in most cases).
So, all these yellow books:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/angermann/225323378/
Are Gollancz science fiction titles?
(Click on the pic to see the close-up.)
There may be a case made somewhere in here for micropublishers, who do "all the other stuff" from author to print (or ebook) ready but don't do printing, instead either only distributing ebooks or doing POD via one of those entities.
Agreed... this could be really good for the modern equivalent of a small press publisher and I think there might be some niche publishing opportunities where you don't have the hassles of printing and distribution.
OTOH - yes, I think they'll be as vulnerable as ever to a bad run of luck and/or sales.
I can see this model turning into the way new authors 'break' in, providing they don't mind working for free/almost no money. But if the actual business of writing stays the same, anybody who starts to do well, would almost certainly be better off jumping on board with a publisher.
No, that's DAW. Who are an American imprint who did the same thing in the 1970s -- spine only, however, their covers were about as garish as any other US publication of that era.
Yeah, I've definitely seen a rise in genre small press operations in the last 10 years or so where they are establishing themselves through adding additional value. Subterranean Press is a good example of that - as someone who puts out rather nice collectors editions of well known authors at quite a reasonable price point.
I'd be happier if they were more available internationally, but good to know they exist.
It just occurred to me - do authors get a better return from the small presses? And how on earth are the rights handled - it must be a nightmare.
It just occurred to me - do authors get a better return from the small presses? And how on earth are the rights handled - it must be a nightmare.
Hitherto, small presses at the upper end of the scale (such as Subterranean) have operated just like bigger publishers, albeit with a much tighter focus. SubPress, for example, publish high-quality hardbound novellas in signed limited editions. It's a relatively small but very lucrative market. Being small, they're not as highly capitalized as the big publishers, but they can still pay a reasonable (not bestseller-grade) advance and get distribution through the major wholesalers, B&N, and Amazon.
I am very happy with the two novellas of mine that SubPress have published, and hope to have opportunities to work with them again.
How things go in future is anyone's guess. I would expect that a shift to DRM-free in ebook distribution would allow them to continue to compete, however.
Whatever happened to Razor Blade press? I read one book they published, Hush, but have not seen anything else. BTW, Hush was very good.
That "double the salary to calculate cost of employment" is a good rough guide for engineers too. I'm a beneficiary of the fact that employing an engineer in Scotland costs you half that of an engineer in Silicon Valley. We're suffering shrinktage in our particular team (i.e vacancies are replaced in India, not here) because employing an engineer in India costs you half that of an engineer in Scotland...
It's also the reason hat the fanbo1's favourite naval fighter (the F-14 made famous by "Top Gun") got binned from the US Navy - it took 450 sailors to man one squadron, compared to 250 for a squadron of F-18. At $100k per sailor per year...
It seems to me that Charlie is close to the threshold where a novel that clicks in the right way could pull him in to bestseller status. This would enlarge his readership base in way that would benefit him no matter what happens to the publishing industry. All of you who would like to see him leap to self publishing right away need to remember that he is winning the game he is in.
Let me make a case that any writer starting out and looking to make a career in writing is also better off to go with the print publishers. I'm not quite sure what the overhead of a publisher looks like but it seems to me that they bet about $75,000 to $100,000 when they publish a first novel. Some of that ($5,000-$10,000) ends up in the pocket of the author. The rest is editorial and production costs and printing, all which then double to account for the burden of corporate overhead.
If someone is willing to make that kind of bet on you then it is safe to feel that what you are writing is good and marketable. If you can't find a publisher willing to make that kind of bet then you probably need to wonder if you have reached a professional skill level yet. There are more people who want to be writers than there is demand for their output.
The publishing industry is really not a very big business domain. Just the semiconductor portion of the electronics industry has a gross more than ten times the size of publishing and is growing while publishing is stagnant. Amazon has reached a size where they have to look beyond books to maintain their growth.
Off-topic.
!!!HOLYSHITSCIENCEALERT!!!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22498298 The prolongation of the lifespan of rats by repeated oral administration of [60]fullerene.
Here we show that oral administration of C(60) dissolved in olive oil (0.8 mg/ml) at reiterated doses (1.7 mg/kg of body weight) to rats not only does not entail chronic toxicity but it almost doubles their lifespan.
Maybe. An alternative reading from what I have heard might also indicate merely that fullerenes protected against being poisoned by CCl4 ie the rats lived twice as long as the poisoned ones.
CCl4 is a different experiment they did (CCl4 metabolism). The chronic exposure experiment was without CCl4.
The whole thing does seems a bit fishy.
Absolutely true. Anyone who's worked outside the Anglophone world knows this is the case (and is worse in the US than the UK). In Sweden, few people work beyond the exact number of hours they are required to, but they are very productive during those hours. In Britain and the US, and especially in London and New York, you are expected to work overtime for no extra pay, never take a full hour lunch and routinely skip your allotted vacation. You're supposed to push things around your desk and check facebook for hours on end, provided you have a spreadsheet open and make all the meetings. Not actually produce more in 60 hours/week than 40 hours/week for a Swede, but appear as if you're really busy for that 60 hours.
I'm really not sure of the viability of this for a new author. My sister's partner launched a publishing house a couple of years ago (completely unrelated to SF). Mostly anthologies of new work. Highly specialised, quite expert in the field. Good reviews for publications in specialist press, a couple of radio interviews. One product even made the bestseller list last year (within its niche area).
What I've heard from him is that it's a hard, hard business, and that money is very tight - breaking even is a challenge. The big money is in the USA, and as he's UK-based this is an added challenge. And the rights are in fact a nightmare (Mayhem #684).
I get the impression that his authors are happy to be associated for the publicity, rather than for any serious money. This is just one data-point, and everything is specific and individual. Still, I'd be careful as an author about putting too much hope in making a living through a small publisher.
Charlie says (#685) that he's had good experience with Subterranean. But he's talking about high-end products by (presumably) established authors.
Charlie says (#685) that he's had good experience with Subterranean. But he's talking about high-end products by (presumably) established authors.
Yep. Also, Subterranean is run by business-savvy folks and, if you transplanted them to the UK, they wouldn't be a small press -- they'd be a medium-sized imprint. (They only look small in comparison with the big fish.)
It's also the reason hat the fanbo1's favourite naval fighter (the F-14 made famous by "Top Gun") got binned from the US Navy - it took 450 sailors to man one squadron, compared to 250 for a squadron of F-18. At $100k per sailor per year...
And in a perverse reversal of that logic, I've read speculation that an unspoken cause of the SR-71 being retired was due to it requiring only about 50 people (airmen) to support it so a Colonel in charge of them didn't look like he had enough experience commanding a big air wing to advance. So it had few supporters in the Air Force.
The India outsourcing thing is going to be a pretty transitory thing. Having done a lot of outsourcing, the headline rates are the tip of an ugly iceberg of costs which make the actual amount you end up paying look a lot more like your onshore rates.
Plus, the attrition rates in Indian offshoring companies are incredible as people swap around for better paying dev jobs. I've heard the average tenure being as low as 9 weeks for some skills... which really can hurt training on a specific project or technology.
The last few quotes I got for outsourcing were up around $30 an hour, up from $15 in just a couple of years. And if you want to go to a big shop with a good reputation you're looking at $50 an hour. And that excludes all your costs associated with managing offshore teams.
The only real reason that some of the big players are still moving there has less to do with the low costs, which will vanish inside of 10(ish) years, and much more to do with the available pool of labour that you can hire from if you're an Accenture and needing to have access to teams of thousands.
Cite, please. Both assertions -- 1% receiving govt. assistance, and starvation being very rare -- demand documentary evidence; they sound highly suspect.
According to my reading--no, I don't remember the cite--starvation, meaning starving to death, was rare during the Depression. Hunger on the other hand--malnutrition, low-level starvation, missing meals, parents giving up meals for their children, etc.--was depressingly common.
My great-uncle grew up in an orphanage because his widowed mother couldn't afford to support all her children--the girls stayed with her, but there was a home for "fatherless boys" she was able to get her son into. That's the sort of thing a lot of poor families ended up dealing with.
For what its worth VW and Honda made cars here and used the same workers who were so bad their American owned plants were closed. They both said the Americans put out more than the home country worker did. Sony said the Americans were just as good. The pro business Republican governmental used taxes to subsidized the moving out of America. And the rules are still working. After all it broke the liberal unions power.
Selling digital commodities direct to customers is not as easy as it sounds. Nor cheap to do. If you go to a 'canned' web hosting site, you will pay through the nose for a prefab 'store' that is set up using baby blocks and looks like crap and doesn't function any better than crap.
If you go the 'do-it-yourself' route, you better be a programming genius, because that's what it's going to take to get Paypal's 'sandbox' to play nice with your php code.
If you go the 'professional' route and hire a web site designer and get a credit card merchant account, you're looking at thousands of dollars of investment up front and monthly fees approaching $200 just to be able to accept and process credit card payments - of which you may actually have zero.
Then of course you have to get your payment-received/download-approval mechanism to work, or you might as well just make all your books free.
Speaking of which, the real challenge is marketing. You have to drive your customers to your site and convince them to buy. If you are only selling one or two books, what incentive do customers have to waste their time to go to your site and look around when they can go to Amazon and have hundreds of thousands of titles instantly at their fingertips, often at prices much less than you could afford to sell your titles? The end result is that many authors end up giving their books away for free on Amazon JUST to get some random readers to notice their books.
Anybody who says it is easy to self-publish and make $100,000 is not selling fiction or is just full of crap. Yes Amanda Hocking did it, but over how many years and how many books? And at what cost? In the end, she accepted a publishing contract because the job of publisher overshadowed the job of author, and I think she wanted to be an author all along, not a publisher.
And let's face it. J.K. Rowling and Amanda Hocking figured out how to write stories people enjoy reading. THAT'S not so easy to do either.
I briefly worked for a high school library and there was a proposal to invest in a bunch of Kindles for a literature class. They were using cheap paperbacks that had a minimal life expectancy. Between the idea that students might treat a piece of technology better, and that it would actually be easier to ding parents to replace a lost or broken $100 shiny thing instead of for $5 paperbacks, the Kindles almost made financial sense with some outside grant support.
Unfortunately, the costs were based on a curriculum of mostly free public domain books. As soon as we priced two dozen copies at full freight for just one Steinbeck, the cost was way too high. It wasn't obvious anywhere that buying a single copy and sharing it to the 25+ Kindles attached to the account was a possibility.
Subterranean folks show up on similar threads over at John Scalzi's blog regularly (he publishes through them as well). I agree that they're just small by US standards. Their volume isn't super high - they print really premium editions of stuff often - but they seem to have an entirely defensible size, product, and profitability picture.
What I was thinking about for micropublishers was more like at the high end "An editor + maybe a copy editor + A publicist + A layout/typographer + a handful of freelance cover artists + a $250k or so initial aquisition capital stake". At the low end, "An editor/copy editor/publicist/layout person and some freelance artists". Minimize the investment - and overhead - of the production process, just enough to take if off the writers hands.
It won't do as good a job as any big press, but it will be more nimble and is probably a better solution for midlist and low end authors. The overall publishing model would shift to micropublishers as the start point for authors and stable point for average authors, with big presses focusing on proven commodities, authors whose micropublisher results were either commercially or critically acclaimed....
I was thinking about bringing that up w.r.t. the amount of work in subbing out work for a self-publisher. I was hired for my current job because we were in a time crunch, and the manager thought to chime in by using a Chinese programmer he'd heard of through his contacts; I was the one essentially managing him. In terms of productivity, it was a net loss. He was missing enough shared context that he had to be walked through what the client was looking for in a sales report, productivity report, etc; he needed more thorough direction than could be given via email. And being located halfway 'round the world made scheduling text chats very awkward. I definitely lost more time managing him than we gained in productive work from him, and we would have been better off if I'd just did the work myself.
So yeah - I harp about project management and the costs that come with subcontracting for a reason.
The Story Behind Germany's Scant Ebook Sales: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-19/the-story-behind-germanys-scant-ebook-sales
I think a bot wrote that one. Which is what new "books" will look like when the only thing left is self-publishing for pennies.
Daveon,
As I said, we've hit the point of diminished returns. Everything you say about the current position and current self-publishing business model is correct. However the exam question at the top was how to escape the path we are on (where apple or amazon end up with company town), and what I've been talking about ISN'T your usual self-publishing business model. In fact, if we were naming it, it would probably be something like "Authors' Commune".
It seems we can't get that through your strawman.
Ian:
However the exam question at the top was how to escape the path we are on
That question was answered. Or at least Charlie gave his answer at how publishers and readers could achieve that.
You're shifting your position in attend to support a concept you're obviously wedded to but very few people actually seem to want.
It's not actually my fault if your concept doesn't work. Sorry.
The article misses two things:
Germany and the Germans want to protect their language from English incursions. (So do the French, the Danes, the Finns, etc)
Germans want to actually collect books. They often stay in the same home for their entire lives, so buying a book and placing it in their home is a cultural act touching reading, decoration, culture and tons of other .(Same with the French, the Danes, the Finns, etc.)
In other words it's a radically different universe from the US-UK universe where Bezos and Stross live.
It rings true, and I will follow the links, as it's you recommending it. But the author undermines his own argument. A comment I tried to post there (but you have to log in with your AMEX card number or social network ID):
"Geoghegan believes Germans understate their work hours, and Americans overstate work hours....This means that Germans are actually doing more, while working less."
So Germans are actually working more than claimed, and Americans are working less. Your conclusion is the reverse of what is implied by your argument.
[End of attempted comment]
Which of course puts the entire issue in doubt--depending on the magnitude of claimed v actual numbers. On the face of it, I'd guess that the variance isn't large enough to completely undermine the argument, or you wouldn't have linked to it. But that short paragraph was a serious blunder.
The last comment of a dozen or so is also a howler. The original version apparently referred to "1,436 hours per week" v per year.
This is a pretty short (1K words) article for two such errors.
In a publishing world where an agent might be an editor, I don't know whether this was the failure of an editor, a copy editor, or what. I would think that simple proof reading by the author would have caught both errors, were it not that everyone who has ever written and proof-read (words or code) has missed enormous blunders.
This does rather point up the value of an editor. Or copy editor. Or proof reader. Or extra pair of eyeballs. Or whatever.
I forsee roving bands of mercenary (damnit, 'feral' sounded better) editors prowling the ruins of the former Great Houses of publishing...
Typical of the old school dinosaur publishing mentality: David Weber's How Firm A Foundation had been out now in Hardback for nearly a year - I could buy it if I was still collecting dead tree books via Amazon or the local book store for that matter here in Australia if they stocked it which none do wehre I live although you can get it in Sydney apparently. ebook.com have it for sale as an ebook at a heavy price (hardcover full price not the Amazon discount price) but only for the US - What? Hello. I am happy to pay the hardcover price but cannot buy the book because I am in Australia - but I can buy the dead tree version for less - this is moronic. I'm sure my $27US is not going to make a lot of difference to Weber but it would sure as hell make a lot of difference to a new author. This is the typical crap that people around the world have been putting up with since printing began and they are probably the last area where such inefficient, monolithic and arrogant business models survive - and not for long thank hopefully. I don't care what replaces the big publishing houses but having dealt with them off and on for forty years I for one will be cheering all the way tot he company town.
"I've read speculation"
Well, that's enough for me. Case closed!
People have referred throughout this thread to DRM. Elladan @262, lifted up the rock but didn't manage to flip it over. We do not have DRM. We have DRF: Digital Rights Feudalism. Which perfectly suits the Feudal Capitalist model of the agencies employing it.
Please think about employing the TLA "DRM" in future. It currently exists as vapourware for the purpose of semantic terminological hijacking.
Justin Jordan @404 setting up the donate button. Thanks for trying the experiment. Justin, if I like your work. I want that donate button to give me a key that will allow me to assert in future that I've paid for "Justins Magnum Opus version 1.01." I expect to be able to use that key to obtain a newer key and version 1.03 for a micropayment admin charge to pay the cloud servicing of that. Unfortunately we just don't have that infrastructure.
Which brings me to the arrival of Mr. Stallman @528 (with whom I was lucky enough to have lunch ~30 years ago, but unfortunately much too naive to appreciate at the time). While I disapprove of his desire to abolish DRM, I appreciate that he is against DRF, and I deeply admire the endless, thankless time he has spent fighting political battles, when he could have been doing something more interesting and creative.
Stallman managed to do something very clever with the GNU license: he used the existing 19th(?) century legal system to essentially promulgate a primitive digital rights supply chain. By doing so he was able to build a 21st (or if we carry on at the current rate, 22nd) century thing using the existing infrastructure.
Because the infrastucture was so primitive the thing he devised was necessarily primitive too. But he is genuinely a visionary pioneer, and this is a great achievement. This does not mean that I agree with his stance on what we should aim towards, but I do thank him for slaying some very significant dragons, and getting a foot in the door.
If we are to have digital rights we will need to code them ourselves. As an intellectual worker I want and need these rights to be effective. (Indeed the point of this post is largely about the authorial corner of this very issue.) As a political entity I demand the political control that they will ultimately give me. Feudalist capitalists (of whom bankers are the most egregious), and yes, ultimately, politicians can be made more accountable. But it will take a lot of work.
The powerful won't do it because it erodes their power, and power is for power's sake. Those who only consume intellectual property like popcorn are interested only in the cost of popcorn. Therefore the work will have to be done by the bourgeouise for the bourgeouise, or the middle will cease to be merely squeezed and become corsetted.
This should be understood in an atmosphere where telecoms have been developed by governments who have always had the technical ability to monitor technologically mediated conversations, and seem to think that because of the accidental ability to do a thing when a technology was young and atypical it should always be extended.
So:
The point here is that Stallman (and the BSD people) made number 1. above happen. It was hard. It took a lot of time and effort by talented individuals. It is still very controversial out there in mainstream society. Linus (and in a very odd left handed sort of way Steve Jobs) have kind of run with it and the end zone is in sight here, although the hardware thing will remain arguably dubious.
I won't even begin to pretend that the list is comprehensive, but it is the sort of thing we need if we are to promulgate the values of liberal democracy into a technological future. Technology has recently provided tremendous power to annihilate communication friction. The power vacuum this has created is being filled by corporate feudalists', and worried/authoritarian governments' models of doing things. Only radical democrats [small d] can fill it democratically. People will have to risk, and probably actually go to jail, to obtain proper legal traction for 2., for instance.
Think of the similar power vacuum created by Gutenburg. How was that filled? It's just too complicated to talk about here, but the whole stooshie lasted centuries.
But first we have to agree about what each nut and bolt is - like the bits of internet that we have agreed to so far. There are many ways of doing it, but that's the hanging separately thing, so we write RFCs (which were traditionally written in Universities, whose peer revue and funding are not uncoincidentally under pressure right now.) Universities were the IP people in the European Renaissance and onwards, and are in no uncertain terms quick off the mark when they finally realise when some feudalists have gotten greedy with the disintermediation of their IP and reputation system.
Free software movements have produced some great software. It has not produced much in the way of radical new protocols (ssh is the obvious poster child here), but universities are where DARPA and the big corporations found the guys who built the Net. Nowadays western government funding for this stuff is nil, and will remain nil, because of the prevailing Fearocracy. IP6 and IPSec research was heavily funded by Japanese microelectronics corporations. My personal suspicion is that the Chinese government is probably the biggest source of Internet Protocol Research right now. But we ain't gonna see any of it until they roll out Communism with Chinese Characteristecs Online for the Middle Kingdom v1.0.
I have a joint qual in Computing and Business Studies. I have yet to catch Charlie out in a significant business or economics related error, either here or in his books. IMO anyone who says "Charlie is wrong on $businessissue because I say so" is probably talking through their anal oriface, at least insofar as $businessissue relates to Charlie's personal workflow!
Not even slightly. Gollancz titles would have an all-yellow cover.
As Charlie says (#683), those are mostly or all Daw titles (and I didn't need to zoom in to see the logo close up, or the slivers of cover paintings, in order to get that).
You might not be guaranteed something that suits your tastes by picking up a random volumn, but a Gollancz jacket was always a guarantee of a decent standard of literary quality.
One point to note: a small but significant subset of English-language readers also collect books. (Impeded, at least in the UK, by the average size of their dwellings -- a third the area per unit price compared to dwellings in the USA or Australia). I know plenty of folks with multiple thousands of books on shelves/in boxes in their homes. We (for I am one) may be a minority -- well under a 10% level -- but we account for a disproportionate number of books sold; while 30% of the public buy none at all, and another 30% buy 1-5 a year, the remaining 40% average over a book a month, and the top 10% buy like they're acquiring stock because they plan to open a second-hand bookshop when they retire.
What does the advent of the ebook reader mean to these people?
Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I think I've bought maybe 1-3 paper books in the past two years. I simply don't have space to acquire more of the things. On the other hand, I buy ebooks every month. (Not counting the review manuscripts I receive from authors and publishers.)
DRM is a major problem. So I have a policy of not buying ebooks locked with a system I can't crack for my own archival purposes.
Your issue is nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with territorial rights splitting, which has existed in publishing since before modern Australia was founded, because it's expensive to ship large lumps of paper around the world by sailing ship.
That it is a real nuisance to people living in Aus/NZ today I will not dispute. (It's a lesser nuisance to those of us living in the UK, too.) The trouble is, the logical consequence of abolishing the rights split will be the immediate absorption of the UK, Aus, and NZ publishing sectors by the (much larger) US publishing industry. Which won't generally pay authors any more for acquiring world rights rather than North American rights, and which will result in a significant decline in the number of original British, Australian, and NZ authors getting published.
We need a solution to this, but the obvious one probably isn't the right one.
AC: You're asking for the moon on a stick. Just your third point alone (3. A micropayments system that works with the above) conceals a nightmare of complexity; a big enough, expansive enough micropayments system to do what you want would attract, of necessity, the attention of banking regulators -- see also Paypal -- because while individual micropayments are small, it would be processing enough of them to have significant impact on account holders. Your point #4 is a joke -- every reputation system anyone's ever proposed is prone to being gamed by individuals who can profit thereby. Your points #5 and #6 add huge extra rafts of complexity by making the assumption that ordinary people want to dick around with this stuff. They don't; they just want to buy a cup of coffee/newspaper/ebook. You think they want reputation agents and negotiators: what the folks doing market research think is that they want NFC chips in their phones so that they can wave them vaguely at a cash register to pay for their latte rather than having to stick a card in a slot.
In other words, you're making the common mistake (among hackers) of assuming that the hacker mindset (wanting to tweak everything imaginable) is ever going to get traction among the non-hacker population at large.
Supporting evidence: "199x/20xx is the Year of the Linux Desktop!" (iterate ad nauseam).
TL:DR; we work with what we've got. Sure, if we could vapourize the actually-existing internet (and IP law) and start afresh with what we've learned we could do it better, but a billion Facebook users say "no".
Well, yes. Actually I knew the answer in advance. I've been acquainted with DAW and its founder for a long time. Donald A. Wollheim wrote one of the first science fiction novels I read back in the 60s and I was horrified to learn later that he had sort of pirated Tolkien's works (using a rather flimsy legal loophole) once he became a publisher.
My point was that other publishers too use yellow to "shout" their presence, and that makes it useless in the end. You need more than a bright colour to make a title stand out. To give it a true identity, you need a drawing.
It's all very fine and well to "drown" the individuality of your books in a simple publisher's identity if you're selling reprints of titles from dead or established authors like Gollancz was for some time, but if you're trying to groom new authors, introduce them to readers you have to make their individual books stand out.
Daveon,
We get it. You are wedded to your strawman and your defence of the status quo - no matter how much it's pointed out that you are tilting at windmills.
Right at the top, I said I didn't think Charlie's idea of DRM-less books on their own dealt with Amazon. Time will show if I'm right, but I don't see publishers getting rid of DRM.
My position hasn't shifted, but neither has your misrepresentation. Sorry.
Actually you couldn't possibly know the answer to the question you were really asking "can Paws tell Daw from Gollancz on sight?" in advance. You've shot the rest of your own argument in the foot by presenting another imprint that's equally "corporate indistinct of author name" as it would normally be displayed in a stack.
It's true that Gollancz did relaunch the "yellowjacket" with their "masters of SF" series, but both Charlie and I are old enough to remember them issuing new (at least to the UK) titles in the 1970s.
Tackling the other side of that argument about the US cover of Rule 34. Take US R34 and put it next to a few "urban fantasy" titles that aren't Anita Blake or Sookie Stackhouse series: Does it still look any sort of distictive? Given the complete lack of romance, supernatural beings, 20something girls with guns in R34, and romance between supernatural beings and 20something girls with guns is the cover illustration completely misleading?
It's odd how the story misses the possible effects of language differences. And the way that Amazon manipulates the VAT system.
Given the complete lack of romance, supernatural beings, 20something girls with guns, and romance between supernatural beings and 20something girls with guns in Rule 34 is the cover illustration completely misleading?
When Gollancz was using that branding scheme, book covers generally were rather different, and they were not selling "reprints of titles from dead or established authors". They were using it for the newest novels, such as this one.
And for a very strong graphic design:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ss-gb_cover.jpg
The postage-stamp might not work too well at Amazon-scale, and Len Deighton was a big name at the time, but that cover design would work on paper and on ebook, while the current design fashion on paper would often struggle in the computer/ebook environment.
...but, of course, that is graphic design. It looks professional and grabs the potential reader's attention. Which is the entire point.
The starting post of this subthread described a generic yellow cover (which I took as something like this) and a cover with a piece of attractive fantasy art; I still maintain that the latter looks much more professional than the former, and will be more likely to attract a reader who knows nothing about the author or the title. (Even if Gollancz used that design 40 years ago; I'd bet they would have been poorly received without Gollancz's name attached to them. I had trouble finding photo examples of the yellow covers, but the Flowers for Algernon I saw was just ugly IMHO. These covers outnumbered the plain yellow by something like 100:1 in Google image search, which makes me think the design wasn't nearly so successful over time.)
The SS-GB example you cite doesn't use a full-cover painting, but I'd defy anyone to call it something other than artwork. The artist was working mostly in type, as opposed to paint on canvas; but they used type creatively, with an expressive (and not generic) typefont, arranged creatively and accented with a nice graphic. It's no less art than something like this, and I find either to be far more attractive than the generic Gollancz covers.
The point isn't whether it has a full-cover Fantasy Art Painting, or not; the point is whether it's an attractive, professional cover design, or something that looks like this. And I'll continue to argue that professional covers will draw in far more potential readers - especially when the author is not well known - than something that looks like it was dashed off in five minutes, or automatically generated.
A question, if one of the results of J. Bezos taking over the retail world is Blue Origin succeeding in providing routine, more or less affordable access to orbit, is it a good trade?
A similar question could have been asked in 1960 about growing cotton in the south in the US for mills in England. The mills liked the setup so much that England was somewhat and/or very supportive of the Confederate States of America. Depending on who wrote your history lesson.
Sorry. 1860.
The GPL is simply a copyright license which is offered on equitable terms to everyone: in exchange for the right to use, alter and redistribute this software, you must pay the author.
The payment is not in money, but in the changes you make to the software: you must make them available at the same time you distribute the resulting work.
For some reason this payment makes some people much more upset than cash on the barrel.
While some people think of RMS as being "way out there", he's really not.
The issue he keeps harping on is that the condition which in the context of print media is identified as "existence" has been interpreted in the context of electronic media as "copyright violation".
In other words, libraries (and other social institutions surrounding literacy), when translated from print media to digital format become criminal activities.
(And, in the States, H.R. 3523 of the 112th congress is evidence that branding literate activities as criminal is not enough for some people -- H.R. 3523 would treat sharing of information as a military issue.)
Now, there is some justification for these alternate points of view: Information in digital form is quite fluid, and the resulting possibilities threaten some activities (and associated trade laws and regulations) which were designed around the costs of printing books. Still, it seems like there must be better ways of dealing with those issues.
Ian, I'm wedded to reality and stuff that actually works. Sorry, kinda of hard not to be.
The cover illustration of Rule 34 (US edition) doesn't seem completely misleading because the artist arranged it so we get the impression that she's within a simulated reality, given the textures employed.
And somehow, it also manages to be truly artistic.
I mean, we're not talking about a joke like the cover of Wonder Momo Battle Idol:
http://my.deviantart.com/messages/#/d4x3nk6
We're talking here of a true piece of identity, artfully rendered by a true creator.
BTW...
I said I didn't think Charlie's idea of DRM-less books on their own dealt with Amazon. Time will show if I'm right, but I don't see publishers getting rid of DRM.
And I think you might be right, but making up ideas that don't pay people to do what they want to do and expect them to do things that they don't will not work.
Sorry.
Charlie:
what the folks doing market research think is that they want NFC chips in their phones so that they can wave them vaguely at a cash register to pay for their latte rather than having to stick a card in a slot.
I used to think that too. I thought: How hard is it to pay with a credit card or cash, anyway? But then I asked some of my friends what they thought about mobile payments, and was surprised to find they actually like the idea. It's more convenient -- their phone is likely to be in their hand while making a payment, while their money and credit cards are in their pockets. It's more secure because the phone is likely to require a password of some kind, more difficult to use when stolen than cash or a credit card. One person even said it would be more hygienic -- who knows where those coins and bills have been?
And if it makes sense for businesses to use, they'll offer financial incentives for consumers to use it as well.
However, there are very large obstacles to adoption, one being the enormous sunk cost of credit card readers. And it may not be NFC that wins mobile payments; I don't know enough about the specifics of the technology to have an opinion.
I think you're missing the point.
The full colour fantasy art painting does not necessarily work well in the ebook market, because people see the cover at a reduced size and possibly in monochrome.
Yes, there is the iPad, and there are readers which run on general-purpose computers, and those print-style covers have a chance in that environment. But if those covers are a sales tool, are they working in the new environment?
The Gollancz cover style, and the cover of SS-GB, would not be disadvantaged.
No, I think I'm getting your point quite well. Full-cover paintings don't work as well on an e-ink screen, yes, I know and even agree.
That's not the point I'm arguing.
My point is twofold. First, your point may be true, but it's not very important; second, the issue is not painting vs text, it's professional vs unprofessional.
I think you can also look at what happened with album art on music players. When MP3 players first started, there wasn't any good way to display images, so album art temporarily fell by the wayside; but as soon as we started getting media players with large color screens that could do it justice, cover art came back with a vengeance.
The problem with minimalism, when it's poorly done, is that it looks cheap and slapdash, with minimal effort. If you're browsing books by authors you don't know, which cover are you going to put more trust in? A cover with obvious investments of time, care and love? Or something that looks like it was generated by typing text into a form and hitting 'print'? A lack of effort spent on the cover implies, consciously or subconsciously, a lack of care put into the contents.
Mich, I wasn't saying NFC was a bad idea; I was pointing out that it's what people want, not a mind-numbingly-complex raft of reputation agents and whatnot.
(I have other beefs with NFC -- in particular, I would like any NFC wallet device of mine to come with an "off" switch so that it's only active when I want it to be and not when, for example, some nearby thief pings it without my knowledge -- but that's a different matter.)
Steering clear of NFC money, there are actually a lot of extremely practical uses for NFC technology which have nothing to do with money which explain why all the OEMs are rushing to put NFC in their stuff, and while all the marketing platform vendors who have been doing QR codes are jumping into NFC.
Ah. I thought you were saying the opposite of what you were actually saying. Never mind then.
I find Square intriguing. In addition to mobile payments, they're trying to put the same data mining technology that big retailers enjoy into the hands of Mom and Pop businesses.
I agree with you that the smart thing to do would be to drop DRM. But I don't see these companies as smart. They're cunning in the way that an animal is, but without any spark of genius.
I think you and other authors get to live in the Amazon company town.
Spot on, Brett.
And let's not forget that before Microsoft came along the big monopolist in computing was IBM. No one would ever disrupt THAT monopolist. Too big you see.
"This fear is of course an idiotic shibboleth—we've had studies since 2000 proving that Napster users back in the bad old days spent more money on CDs than their non-pirate peers. The real driver for piracy is the lack of convenient access to desirable content at a competitive price."
Nice article, but there's so much wrong with that statement, and surprised to see it being stated by an author (who knows just how much time and effort and money goes into writing a book). I know so many eBook readers that no longer buy new books simply because they just read free ones (old classics). The amount of books available as PDFs right now is HUGE: were we to lose DRM (which I think is inevitable, by the way, like you) those unwieldy PDFs will simply become a more convenient eBook format.
Those old Napster users bought CDs, sure, but you can bet they don't do that anymore! (Now that nobody buys CDs!)
Sure, serial non-paying downloaders might just occasionally (once in a blue moon) pay to download music from iTunes or Bandcamp, but their idea of a "competitive price" for their "desirable content" (ugh, "content" is such a weaselly term) is as close to nothing as it can be.
What is a competitive price for an eBook? Less than the RRP for a print book? Less than the already-heavily-discounted price of print books everywhere today? What does that leave authors, let alone publishers, with?
If I spent a year writing a book - sorry, writing "desirable content" - I would feel like I was suckering myself if it went on sale at the kind of "competitive prices" ($5 or less) which I can foresee being the future.
Quite. The GPL does not restrict use, only redistribution. If you don't redistribute a GPLed work, you can do anything with it you like, including making massive changes incorporating stuff from dozens of other incompatible licenses and using that as much as you like. You just can't redistribute the result.
And, of course, something that hasn't been mentioned for hundreds of comments: Amazon's customer service is fricking awesome. I remember having to threaten lawsuits to get one major UK chain bookshop to accept a return of a book that had multiple signatures missing -- missing pages? so what? we don't accept returns, go away!
Meanwhile, on Planet Amazon, I ordered a DVD collection only to find it scratched beyond belief. Returned it free of charge, got a replacement free of charge, it was even more scratched and two DVDs were snapped in half. OK, return, get refund -- and Amazon apologised by email and refunded more than the cost of the collection in apology. You just don't get that sort of service from larger shops anymore. Amazon have applied the customer service standards of small businesses ('don't annoy a customer, ever: do everything you can to keep customers happy, that they become return customers') to a very large business, and that, as much as anything, is key to their success.
It doesn't matter how low your margins are and how locked-in your customers are if you piss the off so much that you drive them away. Customer service remains key.
Yeah, IBM aren't a monopoly anymore. Now they're half of a duopoly, in a different market. And as of September 2011, IBM was the second-largest publicly traded technology company in the world by market capitalization, source. So yeah, the breakup of their monopoly caused them serious problems...
@Nix, 742: no, it hasn't been mentioned for hundreds of comments, but it has been mentioned; quite often towards the start, in fact.
I think the major thing wrong with that napster audience description comment was the concept it was responding to. Ok, yes, it was not a gem of logical reasoning, but it alludes to an interesting point: back in the days of vinyl records, a lot of the market was driven by radio programming (where a person could hear the songs for free).
Essentially, for a profitable music market, I think, you need an arena where people can hear music for free and you need another arena where you can pay for that music and get some musical benefits (higher quality, peer recognition, social goodness, related content, ... the more of these extras you can bundle in with the cost without losing your customers in the noise, the bigger your potential market).
Napster may have been flawed, but it almost certainly was driving some music revenues (and the flaws themselves also deserve some credit here).
The big business problem here is: how do you deal with competition when your business was structured around minimizing costs which are no longer relevant?
Meanwhile, another issue, in the digital world: digital media "decays" [sometimes quickly], as people upgrade their equipment.
So if we can design a "file-sharing" site where you can upload, say "the Complete Vocal Stylings of Liz Lemon", and anyone can stream them for free, but must pay to download them, would that work (at least for artistes who are one or both of fashionable and good)?
Yeah, IBM aren't a monopoly anymore. Now they're half of a duopoly, in a different market. And as of September 2011, IBM was the second-largest publicly traded technology company in the world by market capitalization, source. So yeah, the breakup of their monopoly caused them serious problems...
They sort of still are a monopoly. But in a much more focused way than before. They used to try and sell you everything to go with the computers and pissed off most of the planet. Now they well you the mainframe with optional accessories and make as much profit or more than before. What almost killed them was not noticed that forcing everyone to buy everything from them was about to kill them. Some old IMBers still don't get it. But most of the ones left do.
Old story from around 1992. Gerstner came in and declared no more sacred cows. Turned out something like only 5% of networking divisions sales were not tied to a mainframe sale or maintenance contract. So he sold the division to Cisco and basically killed of SNA and TokenRing. Lots of angst among the faithful. But today they (and us) are much better off for it.
"Yeah, IBM aren't a monopoly anymore. Now they're half of a duopoly, in a different market. "
What's the other part of the duopoly? Oracle? And what's the current market?
IBM's business is now enterprise services combined with enterprise software and the hardware to run it on.
"And as of September 2011, IBM was the second-largest publicly traded technology company in the world by market capitalization, source. So yeah, the breakup of their monopoly caused them serious problems... "
Actually, it did cause them a lot of serious problems. They were near to going out of business in the mid-90s. Then they recovered.
I don't know if anyone saw this article:
“Why I break DRM on e-books”: A publishing exec speaks out
Basically it discusses a publishing exec who has started removing DRM from ebooks he buys so he can use them on whatever device he chooses. He cites a post on this blog as justification.
I believe they're smarter than you think. And that events will prove me right.
Charlie: as another paper-book hoarder, hear hear, this is precisely my policy. I reluctantly jumped on the e-reader bandwagon a few months ago due to having no room left for books, piles of books everywhere, and no car so no easy way to sell on the books I already had (well, there's bookmooch, I suppose, but you can't get rid of a lot that way, just a few at a time).
Since going the e-reader route, I've bought a few books, but it's probably down from fifteen a month to fifteen a year. (The books I'm getting in paper form, I'm getting to avoid splitting single series between physical and electronic forms.)
Tangential Addendum - I have, in fact, since received a donation through the donate button for my book. So if that was someone here, thanks!
A really masterful analysis, very even-handed. Just one correction from the American side of the pond: I worked in a Borders superstore for many years. The store was 25,000 sq. ft. and we stocked around 200,000 books rather than the 20,000-50,000 you estimated. That number is/was pretty typical for a superstore, either Borders or B&N. Mind you, that's number of books, not number of titles. At any one time we might have 20-30 copies each of a dozen or so bestsellers, and other multiples of popular titles. Still, I would have estimated we had about 175,000 titles, give or take.
One thought about Amazon's dominance. I have both iTunes account (mostly for buying music) and an Amazon prime account, and one of the reasons I more often buy from Amazon is (a) their selection, which is often superior to say Google's Book's selection, and (b) I know their DRM can be cracked, easily.
It may be that in theory Fair Play for ebooks has been cracked, but finding the cracking program is hard, and Apple is constantly making changes to iTunes and to IOS to thwart programs like Requiem. Hence, relying on being able to crack Fairplay is a highly dubious practice. You have to download an unknown binary which may or may not be virus infected, and you have to be very careful about accepting iTunes or IOS upgrades, since any one of them might break Requiem's functionality.
In contrast, to break Amazon's DRM, you can use a Python program, where a knowledgable programmer can look at it and prove that it has no malicious code. Furthermore, the same program has worked for several years, since Amazon is apparently not has fervent about stopping the DRM crackers compared to Apple. As a result, I tend not to use Apple's DRM'ed products, because it's just harder to use.
Previously, I tended to purchase DRM'ed ebooks from Fictionwise, using the Microsoft Reader format, because it had an open source cracking program which worked reliably for years. Then Microsft "upgraded" their DRM, and the "Convert LIT" program stopped working. And so I stopped purchasing Microsoft Reader protected ebooks.
So it may be that Amazon's relaxed attitude towards DRM worked towards its favor. And it may be that it could only be relaxed because it was big enough that DRM-crazed publishing executives didn't have as much leverage to force Amazon to do a better job regarding its DRM. As a result, I have a lot of trouble working up as much hate as Charlie and other authors have towards Amazon. If Amazon and the DOJ lawsuit has finally forced the publishers to go to plan C, maybe both Amazon and DOJ deserve a medal!
Re: IBM So yeah, the breakup of their monopoly caused them serious problems... Actually, it did cause them a lot of serious problems. They were near to going out of business in the mid-90s. Then they recovered.
What breakup of what monopoly? IBM's main problem was trying to be the supplier of everything computer related and selling it the same way they sold mainframes. (360/390/... and AS400). The mainframes carried everything else till everything else got so big they ingested all the profits. The biggest changes of 1993 and later was to double down on mainframes and associated services and ditch nearly everything else.
One of the most ironic thing about crowd sourcing to try and fix this is that Amazon owns one of the biggest, or at least the big one I know of, Kickstarter.
Kickstarter uses Amazon for payment, but are not owned by them.
The thing I don't understand...how do the publishers fit into this long-term? Let's assume that 70% of book sales end up as ebooks. Also, let's hope that several competitive ebook retailers exist.
There are 2 classes of book. (1) enough sales to publish and distribute in hardcopy. This class will rapidly shrink as printed book sales decline and as the number of available ebooks skyrockets. I'm imagining that you need to sell x thousand books to make a book worth printing.
(2) not enough sales to publish and distribute in hardcopy. (everything else)
So, the number of books making it to hardcover should fall a lot - possibly by 70%.
Second, a lot of books by low-midlist authors should switch to pure ebook format - probably with reduced editing. This will kill bookstores...resulting in even fewer printed books.
Everything the publisher adds is an optional extra designed to boost sales enough to compensate for the costs of printing and distribution. This isn't worth doing if the expected demand is low. Maybe the publishers can recognize that not all their books should go through the same process and add an ebook publishing arm with a primarily curatorial role.
(Yep. We'll publish it. This is: GREAT!! We'll plan on putting it out in hardcover and distributing it everywhere. Very Good. We'll put it out in ebook. If it sells > xx, we'll put it out in softcover. Good. We think it'll sell enough ebooks to justify editing. We'll cover that, but take it out of your royalties. Eh. We recommend distributing it as an initially free ebook for publicity purposes and switching to 1 USD if you get more than xx downloads. Using an editor will cost you money - consider it anyways. Urgle. My eyes bleed. Here is your manuscript. Be gone from my sight.)
Problem is...they'll have to fire about 70% of their staff. And - their value-add diminishes a lot by comparison to the current day. (70% royalties are quite sustainable for an ebook retailer...I suspect no agent will ever get 35% of sales price for an author of a printed book. That means that, around 30-50% sales volume, ebooks become preferred even for top tier authors.) Maybe online marketing???
Honestly though, I don't see most publishing houses surviving in their current forms.
--Erwin
Barnes & Noble is only in North America for now, but are planning to go global.
While looking for jobs, I ran across a posting for an “International Content Manager” for Nook, the duties of which involve: The Manager, International Content Acquisition will have previous experience working with publishers around the world and should be familiar with each territory’s publishing industry. Candidates should be familiar with the latest developments in digital publishing. Ideal candidates must have business level command, speaking and writing, of English and at least one other language."
and the job requirements for include: "Professional, spoken and written fluency in English as well as one of these languages is required: German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian."
Going back to Piaw's comments. Please keep in mind that deciding to self publish is not a simple thing. Throwing up a website is just the start. How are people going to find your site? Are you going to take on the task of Search Engine Optimization yourself? That can be a full time job in and of itself. Take your blog as an example. You have tons of content (good content I might add) but due to a lack of SEO your reach to the internet audience is nil (current alex rank is 2,657,764)! I have blogs less than a year old with a fraction of the content that do better than that. Authors with Charlie's clout on the other had would do fine. It is the unknowns that would suffer in a publishing anarchy.