E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Amazon and friends do have something to offer: eyeballs, and their good name. So they can negotiate.
I think you'll see newbies entering through what used to be called "vanity publishing" via Lulu etc, getting picked as a rising talent by reviewers, getting in the press, and finally being offered a contract by Amazon. This latter will become the equivalent of the old status of "published author".
Even so a system something like this would be a win-win situation for authors, distributors and readers (and more arguably for the environment in terms of reduced need to chop down trees and transport books around). The distributor could also supply additional services at a cost, such as the ability for readers to have their private libraries in "the cloud" as a dropbox type of system. So I think the distributor would have sufficient scope to add value around the product that an author may not have much incentive to leave prematurely.
It could be that I have no psychological anchors like your grandfather gift, your lovers notes and so on some people have. Some people love sniffing the glue and the ink chemicals too.
Quite the contrary, I love books content, not continent.
I hate having to "break" a book for reading it because otherwise you won't have uniform lighting on the page, in fact you never have in a book.
I hate having to sustain the weight of a big novel.
I hate having to wash my hands because it gets dirty with the poisonous ink.
I hate having to carry around tons of books when I move.
I hate not being able to change the font size or the format in shorter lines so I could speed read it better.
So I started digitalizing my library long ago, and I'm not going back, I'm not the only one.
I met a man 10 years ago that had 1000 digitalized books library, I remember being socked when he showed me. Now more and more people are doing that and is quite normal to see.
I'm cheaper than an existing publisher if the author is willing to go digital only. Hmmm, maybe there's an opportunity for small publishers to make a comeback...
Funnily enough, I was talking to an author in the pub tonight. He was saying that he likes having a publisher because he doesn't have to do the editing, advertising, publicity, etc.
If we end with no other ways of handling the book to the reader, Amazon might get too close to a monopoly in the book market.
Authors have the ability to score a 50/50 revenue share on digital publications and make it a standard, which would be a phenomenal step in bringing fair payment to writers. It would put a writer five times further ahead than any artist selling on itunes, who's lucky to get 10 cents for a sale.
The reality here is that publishers are trying to take a cut of a pie that doesn't belong to them. I legally own digital publication rights to all my works, unless expressly stated in a contract that I'm signing them over, in most backlist publications those rights were never even considered, unless the contract stated the author was selling 'all' rights. The publishers here legally have no right to be interfering, and so far (quite rightly) appear to be losing the battle. If authors switch to fully digital publication to get a decent revenue share, as a writer myself I'll have to back them and, perhaps I'll have to pick an ebook reader off the floor and try to keep my pants on, because as a reader I want quality works and they're only going to appear if authors can continue to make a living. If the publishers get their way and cut the profit the authors can receive, then we might as well abandon all hope of another literary masterpiece.
What this article misses out entirely is the distribution chain.
Publishers aren't distributors. Amazon is a distributor and a retailer rolled into one. Ingram is a distributor. The other wholesalers are distributors.
The distributors take 70% of the gross revenue from a book, leaving 30% to split between authors and publishers. The reason the publishers are defending their margins is that Amazon are trying to increase the already-silly 70% cut that they're taking (by combining the retail and wholesale distribution stages into one entity). Amazon are also trying to bootstrap ebooks by cutting prices, and they don't want to run the whole process out of their own pocket. So the squeeze is on.
The smart publishers would be setting up ebook storefronts and selling direct to the public -- establishing their own distribution arm, in other words. But they're not used to thinking in those terms (if anything, they've been moving in the opposite direction for decades, shedding direct sales forces and outsourcing printing and low-level production work like typesetting).
I imagine that book publishers will eventually become what iTunes is to music, but like the music industry they may have to go through a painful period of denial, loss of old business models and restructuring. Google are also paving the way for the future of publishing with their books service. It seems likely that before long in addition to merely previewing a few chapters on Google there will also be some convenient mechanism to purchase and download the entire book to a reader device.
Does anybody outside of us old fuddy-duds just read for fun any more?
People are constantly surprised at how paper-like the screen is, and I've never noticed any eye strain or fatigue, even after reading my kindle for hours.
I would seriously recommend checking out an e-ink based reader if you want to try some fiction reading. Then head over to project Gutenberg for a metric load of free, public, e-books.