Is Amazon’s Kindle Destroying the Publishing Industry? | Hacker News Reader

Is Amazon’s Kindle Destroying the Publishing Industry?

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17 pointsadambyrtek21 comments

I love this, a beautiful example of disruptive innovation:

-Authors get up to 70%, as opposed to 5-15% -Far less trees are killed

-Eliminates the role of the publisher / physical distribution channel, which claimed the lion's share of the profits without adding creative value

-Marginal cost of distributing an extra book is on the order of cents

I've not read a hardcover book since getting a Kindle.

The publisher isn't a distributor. Rather, they provide editorial and marketing services and a hell of a lot of inputs that are largely invisible to the end user. The lions share of the profit doesn't go to the publisher -- who typically nets as much as the author after paying for all the pre-press stuff -- but to the distribution channel. Which is Amazon (insofar as they're trying to take over and merge the roles of distributors/wholesalers and retailers).

Isn't that true of all businesses though (music, movies, games, and other media)?

It's true in games.

But it wasn't true in music---the industry was vertically integrated.

For instance Virgin Megastore sold records in London, and world wide.

Virgin Music produced those records.

Virgin Music Group (known in the US as EMI) handled distribution of the records to out-of-chain companies.

Virgin even broadcast under the label Virgin Radio, and sponsored festivals such as the V-Festival.

That's just one example, but the whole industry was integrated to various degrees.

Up voting here, cstross is a subject matter expert.

Fun fact: Authors get 35%, not 70%, on any sales outside selected countries like the US and UK. Also, if you set the price above $9.99, you are getting 35% only in any country. This may be OK for a novel, but it rarely works for technical authors. And 35% royalty on a technical book you self-publish is absurd.

Yeah the ceiling sort of irks me. I kind of wish they'd have another point at which 70% picked up again that isn't something fiction publishing would risk going for (at least very often) but would make sense for valuable non-fiction books such as those covering programming topics, maybe $35 or $40 bucks.

The publishing industry is already dead. It's been dead for years.

By 'dead' I mean that the number of copies any one book is expected to sell is pathetic compared to other industries. A book that sells 100k copies is doing extremely well, whereas an album, video game, or movie that made similar numbers would be a disasterous flop. Advances, the main value that publishers provide to authors, have shrunk to the point where you could draw a bigger advance (on better terms) at an ATM with your credit card.

I'm hopeful that the democratization of publishing will allow new types of author to succeed, now that ownership of a printing plant isn't a barrier to reaching your audience, and revitalize the publishing industry. It really can't get much worse.

> A book that sells 100k copies is doing extremely well, whereas an album, video game, or movie that made similar numbers would be a disasterous flop.

I'd invert that. You can have many more authors succeed because they can be happy with 100k copies. Everyone can read different books in the same month, and that's fine.

Movies, not so much. Most of the time the only movie-going options are the same 50 movies, probably worldwide. If everybody reading a book had to choose between the same 50 books because those were the only ones available this month, most authors would die horribly and a (very) few would become super-rich. Independent movie-makers are dead because the economics of making a movie dictate that very very few can pull together the required talent, manage it into an actual creation, get it distributed, market it, etc. So all power is concentrated into very few hands, who need tens of millions of views or the movie is a failure.

I reckon publishing is probably a lot more vibrant than the movie industry. Heck, we're buying (tiny data) Kindle books instead of torrenting them. I reckon the movie industry are thinking "how the heck did they pull that off?!"

It is good that power is being transferred away from a small number of publishers, but that power is being transferred to an even smaller number of platform owners like: Amazon, Google, Sony, Apple etc. To me, it just seems like a shift in power from old media entities to new media entities.

This is certainly a concern, but I think it is very encouraging that the major players- Amazon, B&N, Sony, etc.-- have done a fairly decent job of keeping the devices "open enough" that you don't need them to get your works onto Kindles, Nooks, etc.

Amazon, for instance, might curate its bookstore and censor "offensive" books, but you can still always transfer books using USB (there's even software like Calibre that makes the process fairly painless). I don't have a Nook, but my previous Sony EReader had the same capability-- I actually buy quite a lot of the books for my Kindle from outlets like Smashwords, which cuts out even Amazon as the middleman.

Still, I think its worth keeping in mind that it is Amazon's choice to allow us to transfer content to our Kindles. They could make that irritating or difficult-- and do it at any time. Given that, it is certainly worth being wary, if optimistic, about their policies.

"Trust by verify".

Historically, publishers provided at least two valuable services: distribution and marketing. They captured the value they were providing by "taxing" distribution (i.e., adding a profit margin for themselves). ebooks make distribution cheap and easy making publishers unecessary in that role.

Marketing is still valuable, but publishers never directly charged for that (as far as I know), hence their dilemma.

The major role of the publisher has always been to make sure copies of a book sell.

They select work they think will be commercial.

They pay advances to authors so the author can live while they're writing.

They baby step books to market with limited printings, and then test / edit / revise and tweak cover art etc.

If there's a glimmer of a winner they pour money into advertising in magazines, to PR people, etc.

They pay for exclusive positioning to get it at the front of your B&N store locally, pay reps to go out on the road and talk to local book stores, etc.

So if the end-goal for most authors is to make a living from their writing, how is publishing going to be disrupted?

Authors are still going to need advances.

Reps may no longer hit the road to independent bookstores, but they certainly might hit the road to meet influential bloggers.

Advertising dollars will still help raise awareness and sales.

So while the publishing industry is certainly going to transform, it's certainly not going to be destroyed.

What this means is the little guy has a shot to have a big hit due to the massive distribution power of the kindle/nook/iBooks platforms. It's the same phenomenon as app stores for software or blogging for news or iTunes for music.

Major companies controlled major distribution. Now they don't. Of course an empire built around a competitive advantage that no longer exists is going to necessarily shrink.

It would be folly to think otherwise.

It's true that the little guy has a shot at massive success without an intermediary like an agent, a publisher, and massive marketing.

The flip side of this is that there will be more and more and more small, "vanity" books being sold in small quantities. Disintermediation is about the long tail. The little guy still has very little chance of scoring a major success, but lots of people will be able to write and make a few bucks for it.

Being a part-time author is now a serious proposition.

The narrative fits the US hopes and dreams very well, so well in fact that many believe it. I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to publish (and in fact they are) but this is a lot like the "I would be a rockstar if someone would just give me a break" story in music. Are we swimming in out-of-nowhere hits now that nearly everyone can buy everything you need to record/publish for less then a four-track recorder? No. The reason people aren't billboard no 1s/NYT bestsellers/directing the next Paramount isn't that the man is holding them down, it's that they suck at it. More cash won't change that much (an editor and a staff helps, but it's not a cure-all either).

That said, sure, the concept of books is in serious need of help and e-readers including kindle do help some. I know several people who hadn't read a book since high school but suddenly got used to reading on kindle/nook/their laptop/phone and suddenly trade suggestions and (gasp) purchase actual books. This is a positive, seeing as getting them to sign up for a library card or even giving them (no strings) a physical book to read was usually met with suspicion.

I know the kindle will make me consider strongly having a book edited and indexed by someone I pay instead of a publisher.

I've found a nice new startup by some HNers that allows you to easily publish your book in pdf, epub and mobi formats just by putting it in a shared dropbox folder and pressing a button. I even converted a tutorial of mine into a book and published it in a few clicks!

http://leanpub.com/learn-python

What I like about this is that, if you purchase the book there, you can get all updates for free. That means that I can post the tutorial there now for $2, then maybe add a chapter and raise the price by $0.5 every time I add new content, but all the early adopters have already bought it and get the updates for free.

So far, I love it.

Only useful if you can afford to pay someone to edit and index your book.

Compared to lost work from actually taking the time to write it, those will be negligible costs (for programmers).

For programmers, absolutely.

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