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paxys

Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech.

You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper.

You print books? Well we have e-books now.

You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it.

You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.

You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.

What's sad though is that publishers have historically had one power that would have been unassailable – editorial judgement. They could have sustained their brands on quality. Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good". Instead they went all in on pulp bestsellers and celebrity memoirs at the expense of actual good authors, and here we are.

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I can. Book publishers are terrible and they always have been. At least that is the case here in Denmark.

They game our library system, so that books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries, like a lot of children books are priced ridiculously. These books are never actually put in stores, because why bother? But our libraries, have, to buy them and then pay fees to the publishing houses based on the individual book prices. I guess part of the blame goes to our politicians though.

The worst part is how they pay artists. Authors are paid poorly as touched upon in this article. But illustrators are paid criminally low rates. A children book with 50 pages of breathtaking art can earn you as little as $500 for months for work. Publishers pay your royalties by the size of your printed name on the front of the book. If your name isn’t there you get 0 royalties. If your name is smaller than the other names you get significantly less royalties. If your name is smaller, and, italic, you get almost no royalties and so on.

In general the model has never really worked for anyone except a few authors. There are the famous ones who sell a lot of books and then there are the ones who write a billion children’s books who actually don’t get the majority of their money from publishers but from the government compensation programs. But for the most part publishers have always run a business model akin to music streaming services where only a handful of Danish authors can actually make a living just by selling books. Mean while our publishing houses have been able to employ thousands and keep investors happy.

What a lot of artists and authors have done instead is to form smaller independent publishers. Which means you get 0 advertising and 0 product placement and so on, but ironically often will make you far more money than using the big publishers. These smaller indie publishers, and other creative ways of publishing like the article mentions, aren’t doing poorly. The big publishers are suffering. Thanks to the digital age. But I won’t miss them when they are gone.

> I guess part of the blame goes to our politicians though.

There is no universe in which public funds are leeched without political complicity and corruption. Most likely the publishers benefitted are either related to or provided kickbacks to the influential parties.

Sorry, is publishing a book which gets a lot of readers through the public libraries now “leeching” and “corruption”?

What a strawman!

Depending on how they got the deal with the library, and how much they get compensated for that, yes it is.

What do you mean “the deal with the library”? What deal are you referring to? Libraries does not make individual deals with publishers or authors. They buy the books at market price and pay authors some additional royalties determined by objective criteria according to an agreement with the organization for authors and illustrators. It is all public information.

If you want to make an accusation of corruption you need to be more specific.

> books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries

This sounds weird. Wouldn’t the books which are lent more also sell more? Childrens books are a big market for book stores and of course they want to sell the most popular books. Are you referring to some particular book which cannot be purchased?

Also libriaries does not have to buy any book.

It may sound weird, but there is not a link between lending from libraries and book sales. Some children’s books sell well, but if you go to the sections of them in book stores you’ll rarely find more than a handful of Danish authors represented. The ones which the bookstores know will sell well.

Our Libraries have to make all Danish published material available. Some of this is indeed not bought, but because children’s books are often on the high end of popularity at libraries they generally by every children’s book which gets published buy one of our major publishers. Also, publishers often lobby the municipality politicians who set the overall guidelines for their local libraries to make sure their books are represented.

So, can I publish a book in Denmark, say it costs 1,000 dollars, and your libraries will be forced to buy it just because they have to make "all Danish published material available."?? There must be some sort of guidelines (though seeing how Swedish law works I wouldn't be surprised you guys just "trust" people to price things correctly).

All publishers are required to supply one copy of any published book to the royal library (for free).

Individual libraries are not required to buy any particular book. They have a fixed budget for buying material and will decid based on quality and expected demand.

Out of curiosity, can you provide some examples of these books which are artificially expensive, popular in libraries, but not for sale commercially?

> Also, publishers often lobby the municipality politicians who set the overall guidelines for their local libraries to make sure their books are represented.

Politicians are supposed to set the overall guidelines but not to decide what individial books libraries purchase. Do you have examples where politicians pressure or force libraries to buy specific books?

Are you referring to https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/lta/2004/1439 ?

> Publishers pay your royalties by the size of your printed name on the front of the book. If your name isn’t there you get 0 royalties. If your name is smaller than the other names you get significantly less royalties. If your name is smaller, and, italic, you get almost no royalties and so on.

Who makes decisions for font cover design? Are they in a position to help out their friends with larger typefaces?

> They game our library system, so that books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries, like a lot of children books are priced ridiculously. These books are never actually put in stores, because why bother? But our libraries, have, to buy them and then pay fees to the publishing houses based on the individual book prices.

This is also true of academic presses. Their market are university research libraries who will pay $400 for a two-volume tome on the spread of printing presses in the New World colonies.

As far as I can tell, the comment you are replying to is just making shit up. The claim about royalties depending on the cover make absolutely no sense, since it is the publisher who commision the cover design.

If you can find people that do months of work for 500 in Denmark of all places then clearly this activity is understood to be a high status signal not a business opportunity. People are doing it for recognition or some vague notion of arriving as an artist. You can earn that in a week as a waiter

Businesses that remain stagnant don't get shafted so much as outmaneuvered. Instead of investing and pivoting, they cling to the old business model. Short term, their decisions make financial sense, but long term, it's a death sentence.

Meanwhile, Amazon is looked at as the behemoth in the industry, yet it probably isn't thought of as an online book store / publisher by most people. I think of so many things before I get to, "Oh yeah, they also sell books."

The one piece of information that I wish the article had mentioned is the age demographics of avid book readers. My gut tells me the market has dropped significantly in the last ~25 years, but I'd like to see the data.

The best survey data I've found for this information is linked here [1]. It breaks data down by age range for those who read at least one book in the prior year. It defines avid readers as having read 50 books/year but doesn't do an age breakdown for this subset.

1 - National Endowment for the Arts - "U.S. Patterns of Arts Participation: A Full Report from the 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts" - <https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/US_Patterns_of_Arts...>, page 44

I don't think a company that publishes books is going to be able to pivot to building an online book selling platform that easily. They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire.

Just like I don't see someone working in construction picking up programming or some software engineer picking up construction. It happens, but generally both are just not built the same.

>They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire. Doesn't seem to be true. They pay celebrities (for their boring bs books that no one read) enough to build a dozen online platforms

Well, Amazon started out with almost no capital, so apparently they could have built an online book platform pretty easily. And the capital requirements of selling books online only fell over time as the tech got more widespread.

Businesses like that are everywhere, but the root cause is always the same: they're run by people who do not like or have any interest in technology. And they hire people just like themselves.

In the early days Amazon relied on huge amounts of trade credit from the publishers / distributors

Seem to remember that if the publishers hadn’t been lax about Amazon’s delinquent debt the publishers could have forced Amazon into bankruptcy

(Worked for a major US technical / educational publishing house in the late 90s / early 00s)

> The one piece of information that I wish the article had mentioned is the age demographics of avid book readers. My gut tells me the market has dropped significantly in the last ~25 years, but I'd like to see the data.

I read a lot of non-fiction books and don't think much has changed over time. For non-fiction you always had groups of people, typically academics and successful business people and politicians, who read tons and tons of books. Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, for example, both read many books when they were young in around 1900 to 1930. How many people who worked in factories at the time would have read books? Not many I think. Today it's more or less the same. You have a few people like David Senra or Stephen Kotkin, who read 100-200 books per year, and you have the average person who reads maybe one. Just like book sales, it's a power law.

I suspect I’d read a lot more non-fiction books if I couldn’t access the short form equivalent on my phone readily. But instead I read articles shared on HN or Reddit, with a sprinkling of non fiction books mixed in. Compared to my dad, who devoured non fiction books in the 80s and 90s, my lifetime spend is going to be far lower.

A lot of non-fiction books--especially in the business realm--have always been a long-form (or short-form) article padded out to book length for publishing economics reasons. And, if you look at the programming realm specifically, a lot of reference books are essentially available online.

IMO there are still quality publishers, but they are small and tend to focus on specific topics. Two that I'm aware of, although I'm sure there are more out there:

- https://lostartpress.com

- https://tinhouse.com

Another one is Other India Press.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_India_Press

https://www.otherindiabookstore.com/about

I got to know about them through coming across the book Tending the Earth, by Winin Pereira.

https://www.banyantreebookstore.com/product-page/tending-the...

I have some background in organic gardening, and think it is a very good book.

It is about more than just organic gardening, though.

I would add Stripe Press to this list.

https://press.stripe.com/

https://www.foliosociety.com/ is one of my favorites, the books are works of art.

New York Review Books [1] is another significant one. It's the publishing divison of the confusingly named The New York Review of Books, which is an amazing magazine (it's not really book reviews).

[1] https://www.nyrb.com/

> there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good"

Meet Fitzcarraldo, the publisher house with four Nobels so far: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/10/four-nobels-an...

That strikes me as cheating a bit, counting translations. Still, good for Fitzcarraldo.

> You print books? Well we have e-books now.

It's often the same publishers publishing the e-books. They did successfully make that transition.

> Instead they went all in on pulp bestsellers and celebrity memoirs at the expense of actual good authors

If they're best sellers, as you note, that was clearly a good choice. They were selling what people actually wanted.

Are they? Mark Dawson was caught buying 400 copies of his own book in 2020, but he's not the first or last author to have done that.

Yes people are buying John Grisham and JK Rowling and the latest celebrity memoir, but eventually (1) interest will run out and people will want the next new thing and (2) these big brands will realize that they don't need the publishers to market for them (and this is already happening, as the article says). What then?

Regardless of them struggling in the future, publishing books that sell is clearly superior to publishing one's that don't.

> You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper.

That just makes it Easter for publishers. The major problem with Amazon is monopsony, not easier distribution.

> You print books? Well we have e-books now.

Which have to be purchased ultimately from the publishers, so again, they’re still there making money, they just don’t need to bother printing books anymore. You’ll note they’re not any cheaper.

> You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.

I think this is confusing cause and effect. Authors turned to social media because publishers weren’t doing a great job marketing, not because it makes publishers unnecessary.

> You print books? Well we have e-books now.

The vast majority of sales is still paper books.

> You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.

Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell. Too much, and you have a cashflow problem today. Too little, and lose out on future returns.

> You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.

Most authors have no fans yet, and most never will - most authors write only a few books in their lifetime.

From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases.

> The vast majority of sales is still paper books.

Do you have numbers for this? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if paper book revenue dwarfed ebook sales, but given that the latter has no marginal cost, I expect that profit from ebooks is still a very large slice of the pie.

Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).

> Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell.

A new author with no established celebrity or audience is basically dead in the water. There was a world where a new author could:

1. Write a book that was good on its own merits.

2. Convince an agent to represent them based on that book's merits.

3. The agent convinces an editor at a well-known publisher to take it.

4. The publisher prints it and gets it on bookshelves in stores everywhere.

5. People looking for books stumble onto it and buy it.

That world existed when people had a lot of spare time and attention and relatively few things vying for it. That world no longer exists. You can consume media 24/7 and never come close to running out, all without spending a penny.

The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.

> From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases.

There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.

To sales numbers, you're right that revenue skews it somewhat, but see [1] and [2]. Per 2022, print books added up 788 million sold, while e-books did did 191 million in 2020.

2020 was also a big jump up - in 2019 it was 170, after years of decline for e-book sales from a peak of 242 million in 2014. A large part of that is likely explained by the price gap narrowing, as publisher realised they were leaving money on the table.

> Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).

This is true for almost all self-published books, because realistically your books are not going to be in many - if any - book stores. But most of the best-selling trad published books are. So for self-published authors, focusing on e-books is certainly the way that is most likely to drive actual sales. Sure, you can get some copies into local book stores, and encourage fans to request them elsewhere, but you need pretty decent numbers already to shift that balance without an established publisher behind you.

> The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.

That's true, but somewhat less true for trad published authors where you at least has the shot at getting it into reasonable numbers of book stores. But of course the odds against getting through to a trad published have gotten far worse.

> There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.

That's true, but when it comes to writing the reality is most of us can't hope to live off it anyway, and that creates freedoms we don't otherwise have. E.g. I am not bothering trying to sell individual copies and do book signings or talk to book stores, because I don't need the sales bump it might bring, and so it's all about a balance between keeping it enjoyable and the fun of at least a little bit of recognition and feedback on occasion.

[1] https://wordsrated.com/book-sales-statistics/

[2] https://wordsrated.com/ebooks-sales-statistics/

(they don't cite sources, but a quick checks makes it quite clear the numbers come from Statista - some of it behind their paywall)

This is a really good reply, thank you.

When you say "publishing industry" you're really saying "paper book industry", right ?

Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher, and that's a tried and true successful model adopted all around the world.

You'd have made the same argument for vinyl record publishers saying they're cornered into a niche, but no, as you point put artists will still want editorial power and support, so digital music is thrieving.

> Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher

Except that the biggest platform for ebooks (by a big stretch, they own ~70% of the market) is a company that you have a direct adversarial relationship with in most other parts of your business.

Business is business. If a publisher is refraining from going into ebooks altogether because of Amazon, when they get the option to direct sell and also access the other ebook platforms as well, I feel they're not long for this world either way.

Im not suggesting they are refraining from going into ebooks due to Amazon I’m suggesting it’s not a tried and true business model the world over.

It’s mostly not a going business model outside of the profits Amazon brings in from it.

It's difficult to prove a negative. Ebooks are a growing market in the US, the EU and SEA (though TBH I have no idea about China amd India) It's been more than a decade that it's mainstream and takes about 10~20% of book sales depending on the country.

Amwzon's profits are still split with the publishers and publishers have their own venues + competitors (in particular outside of the US) so I'm not sure why Amazon's presence is a blow against the industry as a whole.

What more would be needed to see it as a validated business area?

Ebook sales have trended down in the US since 2013[0]. They got a pandemic bump in 2020 which didn’t put them over the peak years in 2013/14 and like many things had a correction downwards afterwards[1].

Amazon maintains 70% of the US ebook marketplace and keeps a much bigger portion of the money from books published through their publishing arm than they do book published through the traditional publishers. They also have less high standards for publishing. This makes it harder to find traditional published books on the biggest platform for selling them.

[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/426799/e-book-unit-sales...

[1]https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/us-ebooks-sales-dec...

I'll take your point: there seems to be a US specific problem with ebooks.

In particular, the lack of numbers from the dominant player (Amazon) makes trend analysis all the more difficult. Yet there's still an increase after 2020:

https://www.tonerbuzz.com/blog/paper-books-vs-ebooks-statist...

On Amazon, are you merging publishing and distribution as a single activity ? I thought Amazon in the US only accepted self-publication under their name and the rest of the Kindle available titles are from each publishers only using Amazon as a printer/distributor.

E.g. who would you assign as 50 shades of grey's publisher for the ebook version?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B007J4T2G8/ref=tmm_kin_swatch...

Amazon has both a self publishing arm (kindle direct) and a traditional publishing arm (amazon publishing). Like most traditional publishers they have a variety of imprints (e.g. 47North for Scifi/fantasy). They compete for authors via the same mechanisms other publishers do and have notable non-self published authors (Greg Bear jumps out to me as a scifi fan).

I don't know the specific legal contracts involved with 50 Shades of Grey's ebook distribution but I'd assume that Vintage Books bought those rights after they became the publisher for the book.

The adversarial relationship was basically the publishers' choice.

Remember that Amazon was willing to basically treat eBooks like normal books - negotiate the price they pay with the publishers and then sell the books at whatever price they want. The publishers are the ones who forced the agency model where retailers are forced to sell at a set price.

That’s one way to describe it. The other way is to say Amazon used their outsized power in the book world, including disallowing pre sales and delaying shipments of regular books, to demand a price from the publishers.

It took a bunch of public pressure to change that arrangement.

I think you can easily say the publishers have bad ebook pricing strategy but Amazon certainly wasn’t using normal market practices for setting prices.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/13/amazon-hachett...

> Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good".

this still exists, but the presses are harder to find and mostly independent. FSG books are always good.

also, books these indie presses are always good: - tyrant (rip) - graywolf - new directions - NYRB

and some more, but idk your taste so not gonna recommend them.

Rather than feeling for the publishing industry, you should ask yourself what has gone wrong with the web as a medium for self-publishing.

I can't think of any publishers that are also in the business of printing and distribution. Those are entirely separate industries. There is almost no way for publishers to lose money because of tech that makes it cheaper and easier than ever to get books to consumers while retaining unprecedented control over pricing (fixed, never discounted or remaindered), resale (prohibited), and lending (also prohibited). Publishers sell eBooks for the same price as print books but pay almost nothing to produce them. That's a big bump in profits.

I don't see how any publisher is losing money on their back catalog due to scanning by Google, either. Google doesn't sell or even offer access to the full text of most books they scan, certainly not any that are under copyright and still being sold by publishers. Out of print books are by definition not earning money for publishers, so it wouldn't make any difference there.

If you think that publishers spend almost nothing on producing ebooks, then you clearly understand nothing about the publishing industry.

Notwithstanding what I understand about the publishing industry, I'm talking about the marginal cost of distributing a .mobi or whatever versus manufacturing a printed book, not the entire cost of publishing an eBook.

That's only a dollar or two of difference per unit in costs to the publisher. The majority of their costs are exactly the same for ebooks and printed books.

Sure, I never said they weren't.

> I can't think of any publishers that are also in the business of printing and distribution

You're right that publishers don't handle printing, but they do need to handle distribution. Amazon won't help if you want to get books on shelves of retailers, and printers don't distribute. Smaller publishers will usually use the distribution network of a larger publisher. For example, HarperCollins and PRH both handle distribution in the UK for themselves and others.

> Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good".

I feel this way about DK books although they don’t really do fiction but practical titles.

+1 for DK.

Penguin is that publisher for me. Pretty much everything I've read from them is rock solid.

Martha Wells had a Patreon for a while before Murderbot Diaries blew up. If I have the story right, the short stories she published there are rolled up in a collected short stories book now.

My kid likes to remind me that Naomi Novik was one of the founders of a fanfic site called AO3.

A number of the books we call classics today started out in serialized form in magazines. Atwood, Capote, Christie, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Doyle, Dumas, Hemingway, Joyce, Sinclair, Verne, Wells, have all done serials that are now bound. And if memory serves Asimov and Clarke as well.

The medium may be different but the process is old.

> Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech.

Publishers have been shafting authors for centuries. I'll shed no tears on their behalf.

Prior to the digital age where it's possible for the author to self-publish the publisher was handling 99% of the actual business of selling books and giving authors 15%.

So while I think it's been hard to make a living as an author I don't think it's necessarily the publisher's fault. Better to be the one's selling shovels than the ones mining for gold.

>the publisher was handling 99% of the actual business of selling books

It seems to me that you're rather underestimating the importance of having something to put in the book.

Having written two novels, I will tell you it's far less work for a lot of writers to write the thing than getting decent sales. It varies - some do slave over their manuscripts for years, while others churn them out in a week, but selling books is hard work.

I don’t think it would have been possible for publishers to deal with the absolutely massive amount of books they’d have to vet to do what you’re saying.

That works if the absolute number of books written is very small, so everyone interested in books pulls from that pool.

The publishers could try to find a bunch of good books and get absolutely nothing.

Curation is a multi-stage filtering pipeline. Such brands do not look at a firehose of content - they rely on existing networks and markers of quality before even considering content.

Hard to feel sympathy for industry that left to its own devices requires a 50% discount to sell in store, near 40% to get to Amazon/BN etc, and for bricks and mortar, requires you to accept returns that end up as a loss.

Sorry, but no.

Authors have been complaining about publishers for ever. Publishers treated authors like crap when they controlled the market. No sympathy for them at all.

If they had any integrity they'd move to be the Spotify of books and serve their customers better. Instead (as the article says) they're spending their efforts trying to bail the sinking boat and resist any such move.

The world will be a better place without them.

> You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.

> You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.

Both of those seem very positive to me.

I saw the second part of your comment coming, while reading the first part - in my mind's eye :)

Uncanny valley, or maybe I just read the signals and interpreted them right.

Aren’t print books still the vast majority of sales?

Ebooks are touching or have crossed 50% of sales in certain combinations of markets and genres. Overall they make up 30-50% of all book sales. So no, print books aren't still the vast majority.

I remember reading on Charles Stross' blog that the paperback is kind of dead in the US. At least for his niche. I think his last book only went out in hard cover.

> I think his last book only went out in hard cover.

And ebook instead of paperback, of course.

Also worth mentioning that there are some genres that will never make sense as ebooks.

When was the last time someone bought you an ebook as a gift? This is is the main market for cookbooks, for example.

In the UK many years ago, there was the Net Book Agreement, which was price fixing and Amazon, BooksOnline/StreetsOnline comprehensively broke that. Unfortunately, book shops didn't really learn, and we are where we are.

Back to the title. I still buy books. I've stopped buying them from Amazon, and just buy them from my LBS.

Though one thing still makes me irrationally angry - "SciFi + Fantasy" as "a genre" in bookshops. No. It. Isn't. It's two separate. Two loved-up vampires, isn't sci-fi. At least on Amazon I can filter that. Browse on Amazon, buy in the LBS. Which is the reverse of what I did a decade ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement

The Wikipedia article suggests that it was not Amazon and online bookselling that broke the Net Book Agreement, but big high street chain bookstores like Dillons. One of the references links to a newspaper article from December 1994 saying the agreement is "on its last legs", and Amazon was only founded in July 1994, so seems unlikely to have been very influential in its demise.

And you didn't even bring in LLMs into the equation having hoovered up most books ever written

Publishers are going nowhere. Who else is going to pay politicians millions for their ghost-written "memoirs"?

There are responses to every single one of these. Similar to Radioshack (3D printers, drones, Arduino, Raspberry PI), and Intel's (mobile, GPUs, foundries, AI) bankruptcies or "lost decades".

Distribute Books - They could have built a competitive distribution system by responding to what was an obvious aggressive threat. Amazon founded in 94', public by 97', buying book sellers by 98'. Four years, and Amazon was going International and buying book sellers.

e-books - Great. Sell e-books yourselves. Sell better e-books with Publisher extras.

Scanned catalog - Multiple responses. Legally inclined, lawsuits before it was all irreparably scraped (or afterward). Tech inclined, scrape your own stuff and make it available. Culturally or historically inclined, donate the texts to Gutenberg or a museum so the scraping doesn't get them much.

Authors have their own followings - Interact. "Hi, this is so-and-so from PRH, that's a neat idea for the author's work, and we'll discuss trying to work it into the next book launch." There's probably authors who follow authors, "Any of you wanna write a book?"

Cash advances - The cash advances are broke anyways. One of main points of the article. 70% of spending goes to 1% of authors. Try a slightly less power-law distribution. Maybe something a little less than x^60... PRH alone gave 55% of all advances in $1,000,000+ land. Have your own Kickstarters, or crowdfunding site. Arrange crowdfunding campaigns with marginal authors (for better author %). Work with fans directly so fans can put up the advance with pre-orders. Lots of alternatives to wringing their hands. (If Bates White Economic Consulting is correct, then 95% of money likely goes to 5% of authors).

What this article told me was the publishing industry has a bad case of "try to spend zero work, while making infinite $". 'if the platform is there for the advertising, then the spend might be lower.' 'Does the best selling author have the best marketing budget? No. Why? She's the queen of TikTok.' (she does her own marketing)

Ideally, the authors get their own loans from the bank, print their own materials, arrange their own distribution, put out their own marketing, and then we collect a vague value-add for putting our logo somewhere.

There is some role for domain knowledge, curation, and editing, but the article shows that's not what they make bucjs on: celebrity drivel, bibles, sat prep, and the copyright monopoly.

It's just a cartel, just like the music labels are.

Man can we just kill these industries?

Copyright law is so annoying and its supposed to promote quality...which we get none of. Free youtube tutorials are the best learning resource these days.

The GDP hit would be insignificant too, like <.1%.

Are you under the impression that those YouTube tutorials aren't copyrighted?

There are very few people go this is by Simon and Schuster etc. Most Americans don’t read and the ones that do read a bunch of junk.

    > Most Americans

I would suggest an edit: Most humans

Well, animals, plants, LLMs and the rest of known matter of the Universe also aren't very picky readers.

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