J.K. Rowling's Next Chapter: A Transfiguration Spell on the Publishing Industry
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This is the publishing equivalent of the Stones or U2 doing what they want, since they own their own back-catalog, so at some level it's not that big a deal, less replicable by the small-fry. On the other hand, I enjoy seeing disintermediation, and I truly enjoy hearing the whining from publishers about stuff like this.
One of the major underdiscussed ways to get screwed writing is just not being able to learn how much you're selling. I worked for an author at one point with a major publisher. We literally could not get reports as to how many books had been sold, were shipped, were in bookstores. Nothing.
If you think that's shocking and we misunderstood, I did some research -- it's common. Isn't that strange? You get paid per book, but publishers can't tell you how many books you've sold. Really!
This lack of reporting happens in the music industry as well, for the same economic reasons.
Rowling is going to have access to realtime statistics of sales; along with owning 100% of proceeds, these statistics are a major change in the amount of knowledge and control she has.
Self-publishing of books and music is already revolutionizing these industries, and will turn them upside down once it becomes the norm. More control, more money in the creator's pockets, and a closer relationship between creator and fans. It's a good thing all around.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, IMHO. Kafka had a day job at Assicurazioni Generali, but that didn't stop him writing The Castle or Metamorphosis.
"Harry Potter and Pottermore Publishing Rights © J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of and © Warners Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved."
So she owns the publishing rights to Harry Potter and she created everything about the series (names, places, characters) but somehow Warner Bros. owns the trademarks and copyright for the characters and names? Seems like she may have had to relinquish (or sell, rather) a lot of rights to get those movies made.
Yes, obviously the popularity of Harry Potter is going to do a lot to teach casual users about the ability to get eBooks via other mechanisms than the centralized stores. But it's akin to trying to sell the physical books using a small independent bookstore (that just happens to be in everybody's town) but not stocking it in the big chains such as Borders. And really, it just strikes me as greedy. The only compelling reason to try and self-distribute is to avoid the 30% cut that Amazon or Apple would take. She's couching this as being a DRM-Free maneuver, but providing DRM-free ebooks on your site doesn't mean you have to take them off of the centralized stores too. Anybody who cares about the DRM issue can get it from you, and everyone else can get it from the store. And it may surprise you to realize that the DRM-laden books from the iBookstore are far more convenient for consumers than DRM-free epubs. I can buy a book on my iPad, then re-download it later on my iPhone without having to remember where I got the original epub or without having to manually sync it on to the device. And I can easily delete it when I'm done reading it and then re-download it again if I want it back for whatever reason. And I believe Amazon's Kindle app has a very similar experience.
J.K. Rowling, I love your books, but don't you think you're rich enough already? Give up that 30% and let me have my convenience back.
You argue that Rowling must be doing this for the money and that she will likely sell fewer copies because the distribution channel is foreign to the buyers. This doesn't quite add up. The other extreme analysis would suggest that Rowling is sticking her neck out for epub, trying to push it to the dominant position to force ereaders to take the format seriously.
Both analyses are extreme. The truth usually lies between the extremes.
If Rowling were to sell her books on the iBookstore, they would be every bit as much ePub as if she distributes them herself. What's more, the iBookstore doesn't mandate DRM, so even the argument that she's doing this in order to promote DRM-free is a red herring.
Sure, by all means distribute the ePubs yourself. Rowling can publicize DRM-free ebooks using the ePub format. But there's no reason for her to avoid also selling her books on the existing bookstores. Let the consumer choose which place to buy their book from. The only reason that makes any sense to avoid selling on the iBookstore is a desire to avoid giving the 30% cut to Apple. And convenience goes out the window as a result.
That's fully understandable. I based my comment on several misunderstandings.
So, with my newfangled knowledge, I might say that "self publishing of epub books" would become awesome if it were more common. Instead, however, I will refrain from digging myself deeper into this hole :)
This sounds like great news for readers.
I'd argue that neither is superior to the other, btw - but since we're on Hacker News of all places, it's quite understandable that there'd be a lot of Harry-Potter-loving nerds here! The comment above would be (rightly) heavily upvoted if it had been posted on a Twilight forum...
On what metric? Ah, intelligence? Productivity? Technology skills? Contribution to humanity's scientific progress? And who decided that those are the way to measure the superiority of one human being over another?
You say "moral relativism", but I don't think you've looked up the definition of that term. Moral relativism is about the evaluation of moral judgements and actions, not of people's intrinsic worth.
Fundamentally, you're only "better" than a crazy teenage girl according to metrics that you've made up. For example, if the ability to give birth to and nurture children is picked, you (assuming you're male) would be intrinsically "worse".