Cutting their own throats
antipope.org
antipope.org
As a reader, this does not strike me as against my interests in the long run. I get books teleported to my Kindle instantly -- what isn't to like? (They're cheap, too, but that isn't a huge win for me. I'd pay twice as much as I do currently without thinking twice.) A shame about Charlie's publisher. They've sold me minimally $200 worth of product in the last year, I could not tell you their name if my life depended on it, and they bring precisely zero value to me relative to any other publisher aside from having signed Charlie. If Amazon signs Charlie instead, it will be literally impossible for me to identify any way in which my life changes at a consequence.
Amazon could also eg set very unfavourable terms for authors, so only mainstream literature becomes commercially viable.
Of course, other channels would open up in this event, but there would be a massive time lag. And if Amazon didn't squeeze too hard, they could maintain the status quo for a long time.
Monopolies are bad for everyone.
Only mainstream literature is commercially viable in the status quo.
There are more professional concert pianists in the UK than full-time authors of fiction.
Even as a monopoly, why would Amazon do that? The cost of distributing another ebook is negligible (and may even effectively be negative if the competitive advantages of a larger catalog outweigh the server, bandwidth and other operating costs).
It seems to me that, even as a monopoly, Amazon doesn't really care whether the books they sell are mainstream or non-mainstream as long as they make as much money as they can from them. And that doesn't mean jacking up the retail price just for the hell of it (or squeezing authors for fun). That means trying to gather enough data to estimate the supply and demand curves and pricing based on that (something Amazon is already good at).
I think authors are likely to get squeezed regardless because, like musicians, there are too many that are willing to write for (effectively) free just to get the lottery ticket for the big leagues. On the consumer side, it is important to remember that every book is already a tiny little monopoly of its own, so it isn't clear which way things will go if they are aggregated.
Name three monopolies that were broken up while it made a difference. In which of those cases did consumer prices go down as a result of the breakup?
The only "broken up while it made a difference" case that I'm aware of is Standard Oil. However, the result was higher prices, not lower. (Standard absolutely hammered transportation companies and passed on the savings to consumers. After the breakup, transportation companies could turn down biz from one oil company to get biz from another and thus were able to raise their prices. That's why railroads pushed for the breakup.)
The carterfone decision, which happened before that, is what gave us phone choice.
There was some post-breakup price-reduction in local services, but they all came from the local monopolies that were the result of the AT&T breakup. The services themselves, with the exception of caller-id, were offered by pre-breakup AT&T but were more expensive. Since the land-line service price decline happened when cell-phone carriers started offering those same services for less, I think that cell-phone competition gets the credit, not the breakup.
And beige was available before green. (I think that white was as well.)
I thought that I said that.
> That whole industry was part of the windfall.
How so? Are you claiming that AT&T would have been granted a cell-phone monopoly if it hadn't been broken up? If so, why weren't the baby bells, which still had a land-line monopoly, given a cell phone monopoly?
I think that the success of sprint et al wrt long distance by the time that cell-phones were taking off pretty much guaranteed that there AT&T wouldn't be granted a cell phone monoply even if the break-up hadn't occurred.
The future of publishing will belong not to middlemen like Amazon, but to people who can reliably put out high-quality, profitable books even from middling writers, and who can turn a profit based on the carrot of quality rather than the stick of DRM. That means cutting out a lot of the people in traditional publishing, but it doesn't mean that publishing as an industry will go away.
O'Reilly, Five Simple Steps, A Book Apart and other technical publishers are paving the way here, and it won't be long before someone starts an ebook-specific publishing house for trashy romance or adventure novels and makes a killing.
I'm aware of that argument, I just don't find it credible. The prevailing arrangement is that the publisher pays people to edit and do cover art, just like they pay people to actually print the physical copies. It does not matter to me whose name is on the check that goes to the person who edits Charlie's book -- Charlie, Amazon, the publisher, whatever. The internals of supplier's accounting systems do not surface value to me.
Just because something is possible without a middleman doesn't mean that it is desirable.
This strikes me as the same as saying "save the newspapers, they're the only ones who can run classified ads!". Except, the newspapers do other stuff. What else do the publishers do?
The arrangement we have today made a lot more sense when books lived or died on the retail channel, to which access was a scarcity acquired and allocated ("curated", to use their words) by the publishers. But that world is gone. My grandkids will look at bookstores like soda shops: historical curiosities. There's value in curation, too, but when it isn't backed by the scarcity of access to bookstore shelves, it's not enough value to justify the middleman role.
That we refer to this middleman as a 'publisher' (which already has meaning in the soon-to-be-outdated book publishing model) is, I think, what you take exception to.
Job boards have not replaced the headhunter. If anything, people complain about the job boards being a miasma of trash resume. Likewise, those authors who seek such expert consulting might end up positively differentiating themselves.
In the long run though, the business has been disrupted and it is up to the publishers to positions themselves in a way that their expertise and value is appreciated and accessible to authors who might not want to go through them in the traditional means. So perhaps they would do well to charge for the services which still add value (like editorial work or cover art services).
It seems more logical to me to see this as a service provided by separate agencies, paid for by either the author or the publisher. Such agencies could be of various sizes and compete on price or a reputation for quality work.
Right, but would an author want to deal with comparing all the agencies and selecting the best one? Is he/she necessarily qualified to do so? Like I said, having a middleman in there is of use at times.
Whatever the answer is, it applies just as well to my scenario.
I really wanted to buy an ebook reader when I last visited the States. As soon as I realized that if I buy anything that isn't a Kindle means I can't access all the books I've already bought from Amazon, I knew I'd have to buy a Kindle. This is a bad situation for a consumer, since I'm locked in to a specific platform. Right now it's fine for me, since the Kindle also happens to be the cheapest offering. But fast-forward 5 years, and if there's no longer competition, Amazon no longer has to make the price affordable for me.
Kindle is a cheesy pad for displaying text. It has 80-hour battery lifetime and .... nothing else.
It would be trivial to display ALL Kindle content on nearly any device. The lock is economic and nothing else.
About two years ago, my girlfriend decided she wanted an e-book reader. At the time, you could only get a Kindle online, and she didn't want to buy one without seeing the device first; so we bought a Nook reader (after she played with it in the store).
Over the next year, we probably bought about $2000 of books on it, when she finally got tired of being envious of my Kindle (which I had recently purchased) and I gave it to her.
She ended up spending like three weeks cracking the DRM on all the Barnes and Noble e-pub books she had purchased, so that she'd be able to read them on the Kindle.
Most people wouldn't have done that, I suspect. They'd have just stuck with whatever platform they initially decided on (and had amassed a collection of DRM-laden files with).
A few years later, after amassing a couple of grand worth of DRMed books, the reader failed - and this presented two problems.
The first was that a replacement e-ink ebook reader that would read DRMd Mobipocket files was now impossible to come across, EPUB having mostly won out in the non-Kindle market. The second was that all those DRMd books she "owned" were locked to a broken device ID.
The only solution was the same as in the parent comment - spend a decent chunk of time breaking the DRM and changing their format.
The DRM in EPUB is quite easy to get rid of too.
Ideally, what I would like would be to be able to buy a paper book, and get the ebook bundled for $X more (say, $2-$5 more). I would have the satisfaction of a book on the shelf, actually owning the book, and then the convenience of an ebook. I would also be less bothered by the presence of DRM. If I could buy DRM-free ebooks from Amazon, I would be willing to pay closer to price parity of the corresponding paper book.
Books are a bit different than those media wars, though, because they are something one buys in discrete units. If I can pop the name of the book or author into Google and land on one or another reasonably well-done website by the publisher, and they come to some sort of agreement on DRM in the manner of something like Bluray (which is to say, it is not mandatory that every company uses its own DRM and there is prior art for industry-wide agreements), it matters much less to me that I buy one book from X and another from Y. It isn't harmless, but it isn't the fatal objection I think it is for any industry with 15 different entities all trying to work out how to carve a $9.95/month subscription fee each out of me.
Where I feel like video needs something like Netflix or Amazon to serve as a subscription aggregator and to manage cash flow conversion from subscriptions to per-watch fees transparently, it seems like publisher websites and Google (as a search engine, not some new service) might be sufficient for ebooks.
If the book publishers get their act together.
...
So never mind, I guess.
Unfortunately, many middle-aged books have this problem, and unless you can wade through the Amazon reviews (which are not format-specific) and find out, you don't know whether the publisher just copy/pasted a text file and hit PublishNow! or actually had an editor sit down with it, mark chapters, fix typos introduced, un-break words if it was scanned, etc.
I used to read reviews complaining about it and think "stop whining" to myself, but now that I'm ready books that I paid for and which clearly went straight through OCR software with no human supervision... Really, really frustrating.
These are examples of OCR errors I've seen on ebooks I've paid for
I buy lots of books on the kindle. However, I wanted to read "Atlas Shrugged" and there was no kindle book for sale so I found it online.
I take the customer is always right approach. I am the customer. I consume content in the way I find most convenient. If you make it difficult for me to pay you to do what's most convenient for me, I don't.
But the last two books I looked up were more expensive as a kindle edition than as a physically printed book. Not the same price -- that would have been bad enough -- but not having it printed was more expensive.
Since I am not interested in more dead wood I didn't buy either.
Of course Apple later proved DRM doesn't matter and people will pay for a DRM-free product if it's easy to purchase. But that's an entirely different point. As far as I can see the historical precedent is that DRM isn't enough of a deterrent for most people.
I think iTunes actually supports the author's point - how many people were there using iTunes and Rhapsody? DRM seems to have kept the iTunes customer well and truly locked in, at least for long enough for Apple to make a pile of money off their monopoly before Spotify et al. started moving in.
I'll give you an example. I was tempted to buy books from Apress today (they have a all e-books are $15 special). But I weighed the pros and cons and decided to buy them from Amazon instead for an average of $7 more per book because I like having books in my Kindle library that are automatically accessible.
So DRM is irrelevant but it isn't the main deterrent.
If it's easy to buy from B&N and put it on the Kindle, and buy from Amazon and put it on the Nook, I can see people purchasing from both stores.
If such were to happen, I'm sure that other people would offer cloud services that would allow you to upload your eBooks from wherever you buy them and then access them from your device over your choice of wireless carrier. If they lost enough market share, I'm sure that even Amazon would start offering such a service.
And the OP's point hinges on the idea that while a given person will want to use only one service, there's less likely to be a single service that everybody uses, with each consumer buying from the service of their choice, knowing that their book can be read on any device.
BTW, I have bought a lot of Charlie's books, all in Kindle format.
I really like publishers like O'Reilly and Manning that provide both MOBI and ePUB formats when you buy - that is real respect for customers.
A rundown of the Big Six and their and their more prominent imprints: http://www.scottmarlowe.com/post/Publishinge28099s-Big-6-Who...
Up till then I thought people were just whining but now I see the folly in my ways. I'm definitely for some sort of protection for content authors but there must be another way. Maybe they could have a DR,-like system that allows you to use it on X devices the same way you can authorize a number of devices to sync in iTunes. Still, we can do even better. What about a system that somehow measures ownership differently. Like maybe somehow make it so you have to use a password if you want to transfer a protected file to some other device?
Is that naive? Has it been done? I just recently changed my position on DRM so I still have much to learn. Does anyone know of something like I'm describing and is this feasible technically?
I think Apple would charge you for a whole month, so it probably isn't worth it for 20 tracks, but in case anyone else is in the same boat with a larger amount of music...
Itunes has been drm free for some time now, drm on music is quite... quaint by now.