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Comment by timjahn | Hacker News Reader

More and more, the middlemen in every industry are starting to realize just how irrelevant they are.

Actually, you never stop needing a middleman. The problem in most industries is that positions become traditional. People fill them out of habits, because that's always how it's been. Since most organizations just usually adopt the status quo, nobody questions the veracity of the setup.

We end up with obsolete layers that end up just inflating costs. As long as these old timers have a way to make a buck and don't feel threatened, they don't see the need to optimize or redefine their industry.

It's good to have the likes of Apple, Google and Amazon rattling some cages from time to time.

As I said, you always need a middleman, but you need to identify what that middle is and redefine your business around it. To stay at the top you also need to monitor your industry to know when that middle shifts to something else. Currently, I believe that editing and reviewing would be a key service in the publishing industry. It's all nice to make books cheaper, but I think I value my time more than I value my money in this instance. I'm willing to pay for my books, but I'd still like for someone to vet them.

Amazon's not a middleman?

Of course they are, they just happen to be the biggest one, capable of eating all the others.

There have always been two levels of middle men in the book business. The publishers and the sellers. This eliminates one big middle man.

By calling them middlemen, you're implying that publishers add no value to the end product. That's a misconception: an author writes a manuscript, a publisher makes it into a book. Often, it takes as much time and effort to turn a manuscript into a book as it took the author to write the manuscript.

As more writers choose to self publish ebooks, it's becoming quite clear how crucial the role of a publisher is. Most of those self produced 'books' are completely unreadable.

Charlie Stross explained it well: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...

Also, Amazon isn't taking publishers out of the equation. It's becoming one.

Everyone who voted the parent comment down because it offended their groupthink should read the forwards of a few books. Authors constantly sing the praises of editors who helped them get their books into shape. Good producers do the same thing to music.

This meme that there are no benefits to professional production is demonstrably stupid. If you're unable to leave it on Reddit or Slashdot where it belongs, at least have the courtesy not to mod down people who say otherwise.

There is no question that services like editing are valuable and necessary. The salient question seems to be why authors don't hire their own editors, rather than overpay for the service as part of an unattractively-priced bundle of related services from a publishing house.

Right. Editors provide a valuable service, but there's no reason that needs to be bundled with the other "services" provided by publishers, most of which have become or are becoming irrelevant, particularly, IMO, the functions of providing capital and risk pooling. A traditional publisher would provide an author with a (usually small) advance on royalties to live on while writing the book (think of it as a payday loan in terms of financial soundness and you'll have the right idea there), front the money to print and distribute the book (a significant amount when you're talking paper), and assume the risk that the book would tank or that the author would flake out and not finish the book. They could do that because they'd pool the risk across a large number of books. If the editorial decisions about what to publish were sound overall, the publisher could make a profit despite losing money on individual books.

The cost of "printing" and distribution is headed toward zero and editing, cover art, and services can be purchased. That basically leaves (from the author's perspective) "source of short-term loans under very bad terms" as the only remaining function, but, you know, there are other places that provide those. :-)

It is more an equity investment in the book product than a payday loan, as there is no obligation to repay if sales are bad. Or you can regard it as the publisher creating a limited liability company for each book that pays the author. It is much like VC financing for a product company in terms of the model, although the payoffs are usually distributed a little differently.

So the essential part of the publisher reduces to a provider of domain-specific loan insurance, where their knowledge of the industry and evaluation of the commercial prospects of your writing informs the risk premium that is charged.

Sounds like there might be an emerging market for independent expert editors who work directly for self-published authors. If an author gets 70% back on each Kindle sale, she can afford to send some percentage of that to her editor. The author gets high quality editing and the editor gets a continuous income stream.

The publisher is a very odd beast -- the services you are citing as their primary benefit are the kind you would expect an author with money to simply pay for themselves.

Or to put it another way, publishers are a combination of:

1. Angel investors / Talent scouts (insert moneyball reference here)

2. Labor pool for book completion (cover design, editing, etc)

3. Marketing assistance

4. Physical printing

5. B2B marketing to get printed books on bookshelves.

Five distinct businesses. Why are they commonly grouped? My guess is a combination of most authors not being very business oriented / not wanting to not think about these sorts of things (30%), and most authors not having the money to hire their own #2 (the other 70% of the story).

Amazon already has a product for #5 on its own, and a separate product providing #4 and #5 together. This story is about them adding on the #1-#2-#3 punch that is currently the exclusive domain of publishers.

Stross is a technical and successful guy -- he should probably just hire his own #2 and #3, and then use amazon's #4 and #5 service. He probably won't, out of loyalty to the angel investor that pulled him out of obscurity (or the contract his angel made him sign...), but hopefully future Strossi will!

You have to think about it from the author's perspective. Many authors are not interested in the minutiae of the process, and the publisher serves as a single point for the author. There's no need to deal with a separate person for market and a separate person for physical distribution. There is a value (albeit small for some people) to bringing the disparate pieces together into a single package, freeing the author from the need to handle these pieces.

FWIW: I wish the people performing this service in the financial industry weren't gouging customers ...

Vertical integration existed before Steve Jobs hit the big time.

My mother was a self-publisher and also ran a bookstore. She published books for a few others as well, and would constantly run into the misconception that publishing is just about taking the words from the author and giving them to the printer. Publishing is quite resource-intensive (not to say that the big publishers don't also engage in shennanigans)

Similarly, my housemate's mother worked as an editor for a long time. My favourite quote of hers was "You know how they say everyone has a book in them? It's simply not true."

I don't think that calling somebody a 'middleman' implies that they add no value. The vast majority of middlemen add value: repackaging for local markets, translating, navigating bureaucracies, advertising, shipping, placing the product in stores and generally connecting producer with consumer.

I wrote that calling publishers 'middlemen' implies that they add no value to the end product.

"Navigating bureaucracies, advertising, shipping, placing the product in stores and generally connecting producer with consumer" add no value to the end product.

Repackaging and translation for local markets do add value to the end product, but those aren't activities one thinks of when mentioning 'middlemen'. Those services would typically be performed by a localization consultant, hired by the importer.

Merriam-Webster defines 'middleman' as:

An intermediary or agent between two parties; especially : a dealer, agent, or company intermediate between the producer of goods and the retailer or consumer

An importer is higher up the chain, acting as an intermediate between the manufacturer and the distributor.

I think timjahn was trying to say something like:

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE

...Highlander!

Amazon was quoted in the article as saying that the only two important parties in publishing are the writer and the reader. Of course it was hard to understand that statement, blocked as it was by Amazon's foot in its mouth.

Amazon is a plattform. Not a middleman.

Woha, -3 without a comment. Amazon for sure will add complete self service. Not sure what other HNers think, but for me there is a difference between a service plattform and a middle man.

E.g. take real estate websites. They are not a middleman, they are not a real estate agent. There is a significant difference between a plattform and middlemen. Real estate websites did not add a new middleman when replacing real estate agents.

This is enforced by Amazon emphasizing that there are only authors and readers.

FWIW I agree with you. I think your point is similar to the old library vs framework debate (http://ifacethoughts.net/2007/06/04/difference-between-a-lib...)

Library/Toolkit = Platform = Amazon's usual play. They give people the tools needed to succeed at something.

Framework = Middle-man = Publishers. They take a well defined contribution from an author and try to succeed on behalf of the author.

Seems correct to me.

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