Why can't the publishing industry just hurry up and die?
They provide fewer and fewer valuable services as the marginal cost of content distribution approaches zero and they just seem more like rent seekers.
They provide fewer and fewer valuable services as the marginal cost of content distribution approaches zero and they just seem more like rent seekers.
> Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House
The list is here, but it takes multiple seconds to render each of the many pages: https://publishers.org/who-we-are/our-members/
1517 Media
Academic Innovations
Albert Whitman & Company
American Anthropological Association (AAA)
American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)
American Chemical Society (ACS) American Dental Association Publishing (ADA)
American Diabetes Association
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)
American Medical Association (AMA)
American Physical Society (APS)
American Physiological Society, The (APS)
American Psychological Association (APA)
American Reading Company
American School for Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA)
American Society for Indexing (ASI)
American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO)
American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP)
American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
American Thoracic Society (ATS)
American University in Cairo Press
Applied Educational Systems
Aquila Polonica (U.S.) LTD
Bar Charts, Inc.
Baylor University Press
Benchmark Education Co.
Berghahn Books
Bernson LTD (Big Hat Press)
BioZone USA
Blooming Twig Books
Bloomsbury USA
BMJ Publishing Group Limited
Bonnier Publishing USA
British American Publishing
Brookings Institution Press
Burn House Publishing
Cambridge Information Group (CIG)
Cambridge University Press
Catapult
Caslon, Inc.
Cato Institute
Cengage Learning
Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST)
Chronicle Books
Cider Mill Press Book Publishers
Columbia University Press
City Lights Booksellers & Publishers
Common Ground Research Network Crossway
Davies Publishing Inc.
Davis Publications Inc.
Disney Publishing Worldwide
Experiment, The
F.A. Davis Company
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB)
Fordham University Press
General Conference of 7th-Day Adventists
Georgetown University Press
Georgia McBride Media Group
Getty Publications
GoodKnight Books
Greystone Books Ltd
Group Publishing
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
Hansen Publishing
HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide
Harrington Park Press
Harvard Business Review Group
Harvard University Press
Hogrefe Publishing
Holiday House Inc.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES)
Humanix Books
Independent Institute, The
INFORMS
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
InterVarsity Press
John Hunt Publishing
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Johns Hopkins University Press
The Journal of American Academy of Business (JAABC)
Judson Press
Kappa Delta Pi
Kodansha USA
Libros Publishing
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc
Macmillan
Massachusetts Medical Society
Materials Research Forum
McGraw Hill Education
MedMaster Inc
Melville House
Michigan State University Press
Moody Publishers
Morgan & Claypool Publishers
Morton Publishing Company
Museum of Modern Art , The (MOMA)
National Academies Press
Naval Institute Press
New World Library
NY Media Works, LLC
NYU Press
Oak Knoll Press
Okapi Educational Publishing, Inc.
Oncology Nursing Society
Optical Society of America (OSA)
Oxford University Press
Penguin Random House
Pennsylvania State University Press
Princeton University Press
Pushkin Press
Quirk Books
RELX Group
Riverdale Avenue Books
Rosen Publishing Group
SAGE Publications
Scholastic Testing Service, Inc
Scholastic, Inc.
Simon & Schuster
Social Studies School Service
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)
Springer Publishing Company
Stanford University Press
Story Plant, The
Tanglewood Publishing, Inc.
Taylor and Francis Group
Teachers College Press
Teacher Created Materials
Thames & Hudson
World Bank, The
Trialtea USA, LLC
Turner Publishing Company
University of Alaska Press
University of California Press
University of Chicago Press
University of Illinois Press
University of Massachusetts Press
University of Minnesota Press
University of North Carolina Press
University of Pennsylvania Press
University of Texas Press
University of Wisconsin Press
University Press of Colorado
W. W. Norton & Company
Walter de Gruyter, Inc.
Wesleyan University Press
White House Historical Association
Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Wolters Kluwer Health- Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins
Workman Publishing Company
Yale University Press
YBK Publishers
Pearson
American Federation of Arts
American College of Cardiology
Imbrifex Books
Waterhouse Press
Then when you add on the publisher side of distribution, fulfillment, lost orders, customer service, marketing etc you have a whole other beast.
It’s manageable in the right circumstances, and pieces can be sort of automated or out sourced, but (at least for me) the other grinds begin to absolutely kill my ability to do the creative work. And meanwhile fans are like “omg when’s the next book coming out?!?!?”
That’s said, I think the publishing “industry” needs to be ripped down and overhauled, but the work a publisher needs to do is very valuable and different than the creative needs.
In addition, people tend to vastly underestimate the difficulty of building a successful marketing campaign to actually sell books, in addition to the extreme difficulty of actually building relationships with distributors. Successfully selling a book is not that different than running a business. There's a lot more you need than just coordinating a "supply chain."
I feel like there are a lot of "experts" on publishing in this discussion, but few actual publishers who know the reality of the business.
Individual book sellers still could do some marketing simply to increase sales once such a good book shows up.
A friend of mine is an independent author who self-markets their books and they've learned over years where money will pay itself back and where you're throwing it into a hole - but not investing in promotion at all just means you'll be relegated to obscurity.
When I'm shopping for a broom I have some expectations - I've really grown to appreciate the rubber headed brooms over bristly ones and I am pretty tall so length is a decent consideration... When I'm shopping for a book, what do I have to go on? Cover art and the summary, probably... and those are hardly helpful.
1. Specifically I'm thinking of multi-author series like SW:EU or Dragonlance.
I'd love to know how much of the publishing and book-selling industries are coasting on inertia of "we've always done it this way", or the fear of "we've never done it this way".
It seems like electronic distribution should have massive ramifications for the business model. Does the publisher/distributor/retailer model really still need to exist in an electronic distribution world? I don't know enough about the value, beyond purchase aggregation, that distributors in that market actually provide.
What you see as "building relationships" sounds, to me, like needless middlemen exacting a tax on commerce.
Many businesses are little more than expertly coordinating a supply chain. That's a competency that offers a competitive advantage. Why is this business so different?
UBI would fully transform that industry.
Kickstarter is more about how good your pitch is.
In fact quality control is, I think, where publishers bring the most value today. Both in science and in the general case. Maybe the only one in the digital era.
(I should note that your percentages are way off, by the way – in the US I "get" 25% of the cover price for digital and between 7.5% and 25% for physical depending on the edition.)
So, yeah, it is similar to VC, and just like VC, they expect to profit off the transaction.
It seems like the marginal cost of the "last step" cost is still a very significant component, though. High-touch sales channels, handling returns (consignment sales), and co-promotion expenses all seem tightly coupled to that "last step" and sales of physical articles.
Yeah, let's get rid of all the authors, newspapers, magazines, journalists, etc.
I mean, what does the publishing industry even do? It serves no value! And the gall they have to actually try to protect their work and make a living from it? Ridiculous!
After dealing with decades of "intellectual property" industries waging war against general purpose computing I'm heavily biased against their interests. The amount of needless complexity I've had to deal with, and money I've seen wasted, service of DRM fills me with a simmering rage. They burned much of their goodwill with me a long time ago. Perhaps I take it too personally, but it certainly feels personal when the things I want to do with technology I own are thwarted in the name of serving DRM.
I'm exceedingly frustrated at the concessions made for owners of "intellectual property" in copyright law, too.
I'm particularly miffed by egregiously long copyright terms. These terms prevent derivative works from being made in a culturally-relevant timescale. They prevent the copying of "unprofitable" works that lack mass market appeal and become "out of print". They send orphan works in a legal limbo that prevents their use for fear of litigation. They hold back the progress of "science and the useful arts" for the benefit of incumbent owners by creating a barrier to entry. They create little incentive for new works to be created.
I'm frustrated that the "intellectual property" industry has worked to brainwash the public into believing that the public domain is the exception, instead of the default. They've promoted a believe to creators that their works need to be "owned" by rent seeking middlemen. They've sold a moral argument about creators being deprived of their compensation. St the same time, they use "creative" accounting practices to divert compensation away from creators.
All of that frustration fuels my hyperbole.
We live in a world with ubiquitous copying machines with ubiquitous connectivity. That genie can't be put back in its bottle. It can't be legislated away without ending up in a dystopian "Right to Read"[1] future.
From where I stand the "intellectual property" industries want the "Right to Read" future, to the detriment of the good computing provides to humanity. Rather than change their business models and cope with a new reality, the "intellectual property" industries claw fitfully at whatever legislative means they can to preserve their dying business models.
Perhaps it'll take a generation or two dying off before we can come up with new business models that'll make this all irrelevant. I don't have the answers, but I really think that "don't use technology to do what it does best" is a very viable answer.
I'd be very afraid that "new business model" is that you have to watch an ad every 10 pages or books are only available through a subscription model of some sort--and they're only available through a SaaS.
I'll keep buying physical articles as long as I can-- books, optical discs, etc. I'll reward creators who continue to make their works available that way. I'll buy a ticket when an author comes thru on a lecture tour. I'll attend a live concert and buy a shirt. (Admittedly, our current pandemic situation makes some of that difficult, but I do think it'll eventually pass, or we'll come up with new ways to do those things.) I've been reticent to enter into the patronage ecosystem (primarily because I'm concerned about the cut the middlemen take and the value they actually provide, as well as what the user experience is like) but I'm leaning more toward doing some of that too.
I'd argue this makes their services more important to writers because when anyone can publish content, you have to work harder to stand out from the crowd.
Anyone can publish to YouTube and you can see the likes, comments, and subscribes. Seems pretty easy to stand out.
The IA blatantly stole the work of thousands of people. They saw a problem and wanted to act - laudable. They could have done that be arranging to buy unique copies of each book they lent out. Or they could have tried to come to some agreement with the publishers. Or a bunch of other alternatives.
They didnt.
They stole the work and thankfully there is some players with enough clout in the market to do something about it.
If the big publishers ever do go away it will be a bad time for those like me who are never going to make enough revenue from our works to warrant a court proceeding while our works are stolen.
re: your business model being sustainable if the current "industry" goes away - Maybe that ship has sailed. You can't make a living being a buggy whip manufacturer or an elevator operator anymore either.
Presumably the author and/or publisher lost the use of the income they could reasonably have expected to receive corresponding to a certain number of copies of the work going into circulation.
Anyhow, physical articles are not the only things that can be stolen.
Most justifications for property (both personal property and real estate) invoke the fact that pieces of property are rivalrous (one person's use interferes with another's). Calling unlicensed copying "stealing" ignores the crucial difference between physical goods and digital files.
We have a term for copyright infringement. We have a term for unlawfully taking things that are subject to scarcity. They are two different things. The lack of scarcity matters.
Until then if you want to read an authors work then you need to pay their (usually very small) fee.
I would love to live in a society that would recognize the post-scarcity nature of many goods nowadays and de-commodifies them, including computer programs, basic food, and in certain cases housing.
There will be no more "scarcity" when the "value" of the time required to produce these works reaches "zero." Until then, there will be plenty of scarcity.
By the way, I think we would all need "immortality" in order to reach that point.
So, yeah.
Not going to happen.
Bits on a computer that can be reproduced forever are not scarce.
Some people don't seem to value the effort required to create new ideas. Hence, they are seen as "free" and not worth anything.
A car is not just an object, a car is also an idea. It's a design, the engineering of its parts, the implementation of its constructions, the code needed to make it work, and so on. And yet if we could replicate it for free, achieving a marginal labour cost of zero, then it would not be scarce anymore.
You are getting too caught up on the fact that some things have low marginal costs to produce that you're entirely neglecting that overhead costs are a thing that also exist.
Even for something like Linux, there are gigantic overhead costs. The vast majority of Linux commits are made by people sitting at their paid job. Those lines of code are not free, they are financed by the companies who are willing to pay Intel/IBM/RedHat etc for their products and services.
But we don't live in that society.
I guess we could argue about semantics but depriving me of my ability to legitimately profit from my work while the IA wrapped itself in a flag of doing good seems like at the very least a very low form of behaviour, as well as illegal. And I doubt many people would describe us any word other than theft.
It is theft in the same way that someone squatting unused land in the north of Canada and being granted ownership is theft. The fact that we live in a system where this might cause loss of income for someone is neither necessary nor the moral responsibility of the Internet Archive, SciHub or Library Genesis.