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Comment by gamble | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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".

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