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Comment by JulianMorrison | Hacker News Reader

The publishers are going to lose this one, and probably disappear as an industry. They truly have no leverage. What can they offer to authors? Editors? "I'll hire one", says the author. Advertising? "You make me pay for that anyway", says the author, "and there's the web, and without paper and the associated payola, advertising will be much cheaper." The sensual experience of a physical book? "That doesn't put food on my table", says the author.

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I imagine the way that it might work in future is that the author registers their new book with Google or Amazon (or some other similar company acting as a distributor), and they then make the book searchable and downloadable by readers. The author selects what price they want to charge, with some percentage going to the distribution company. The distribution fee might vary depending upon whether the author decides to opt for additional promotion/advertising, or just do that side of things themselves on their own web site, or via their own social network. Authors retain copyright on their works, and can at any time cancel an account with a distributor and go to a new one.

Hopefully the model you envision is what happens to all media, like music and (albeit much later) TV and movies.

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I think any big-name distributor would want at minimum some sort of fixed term contract. Or else, the author could pull their book (or series) to a private site (and pocket 100%) the moment it took off.

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".

In the sort of system I envision the author could pull their book as soon as it became popular, but it's unlikely that an author using their own web site or social network would be able to compete against the large marketing and delivery potential of companies like Google or Amazon. Perhaps there would need to be a minimum term.

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.

I never understood what sensual pleasure a physical book gives you, and I'm a big big reader of books.

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.

Yeah. I personally have nothing against paper books - except they are heavy and waste space. And when you think about it, you're holding what amounts to a 5mb data file (with multiple immutable passive display screens) and it's about twice the physical volume of a 500gb hard drive and doesn't mass much less. Wildly inefficient! A micro-SD card the size of your fingernail could store a thousand times as much.

If I can not re-sell my ebook I wont buy it. If an ebook comes with DRM I wont buy it. Period.

Most authors don't know how to nor want to self-publish their books. Publishers also have extensive back catalogs. So even if a distributor (like amazon) started to provide the same services, they would have to compete with the publishers as they, as a distributer, would need the publishers back catalogs.

>>Most authors don't know how to nor want to self-publish their books.

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...

> What can [publishers] offer to authors?

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 the Kindle succeeds on grabbing the e-book market then the leverage is all in Amazon's hands.

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.

Here in the UK, all the momentum I've seen is with the low end readers, Sony PRS-300 and similar.

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