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Comment by alfor | Hacker News Reader

But they are also killing books.

Youtube is free, instant, fast.

I love books, when people spend their life condensing information and you spend a few hours to get the most important parts, but controlling access more and more mean that books will get less and less important.

Books and publishing industries are a result of a technology: paper, printing, binding. Now in the digital age an ebook should cost close the the amount the author get 1$-2$/book.

If they were this price and easily downloadable we would have a massive shift to digital books, completely disrupting the industry. But what we have is stagnation and regulatory capture.

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> Books and publishing industries are a result of a technology: paper, printing, binding. Now in the digital age an ebook should cost close the the amount the author get 1$-2$/book.

This is a very technocratic view of book publishing. I think you're leaving out a lot of what goes into creating, marketing and distributing a book which is not labour of the author. Even in the digital age.

Sure, authors could contract those services out using their (expected) revenue on a book. But at some point you'll inevitably get companies offering to manage that process for authors because it creates overhead that distracts from the creative process or thought process: Publishers.

There are lean alternatives to big publishers out there, so it's easy to get self-published. But the weight a big publisher can put behind a release, the distribution network they have, can - even in the internet era - still affect a book's success heavily.

There is a bundle value in the offering.

- editor, marketing, graphics - brand

if the value created by the author is worth 1-2$ I don’t think the rest of the work on the actual content is worth more.

Leaving much of the rest on the brand.

I think that the brands have successfully commoditized the authors witch is the valuable portion of the book and have mostly monopolised their position. Now they will use their excess capital to keep their position because that is what is most valuable to them.

At the same time they act as a filter judging what is worth putting in a book with their name on it, creating a standard of quality.

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