Hachette Puts out Response to Amazon Statement
digitalbookworld.com
digitalbookworld.com
Also, that was a lot of words with basically no content:
"We publish books. We think books are special. We have not yet reached an agreement with Amazon to keep selling books to them, but we will eventually.
Also, we think this is all Amazon's fault and we're not going to consider their proposal to pay our authors in the meantime until after we resolve the contract dispute."
We’ve offered to Hachette to fund 50% of an author pool – to be
allocated by Hachette – to mitigate the impact of this dispute
on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%.
Once we have reached such an agreement, we will be happy to
discuss with Amazon its ideas about compensating authors for
the damage its demand for improved terms may have done them,
and to pass along any payments it considers appropriate.Amazon made a similar offer to Macmillan several years ago, and in fact authors did end up being paid an "outage adjustment" as a result: http://www.mhpbooks.com/amazon-macmillan-pay-authors-for-boo...
Hachette's response makes sense. 'We didn't agree to the terms you tried to dictate to us, and now you're saying it's half our fault that these authors lost revenues as a result of your retaliation?'
Aren't they doing a standard renegotiation of their contract? If they don't have a contract, Amazon is under no obligation to sell Hachette's products at all. Meanwhile, I wasn't in the room for their contract negotiation, but who's to say that Hachette isn't the one making unreasonable demands?
The digital side of amazon story is not interesting in the slightest. The only real story is them leveraging their print marketplace to put pressure on a digital agreement. It's an abusive hardball tactic but one that large brick and mortar bookstores have done in past.
This story shows that publishers are really obsolete. The production doesn't matter anymore with Print-On-Demand and Digital. The main services they offer are distribution and promotion. Many of the publishers have offloaded their distribution to amazon (and the like) and unless you're a big author the promotion is virtually non-existent. One could also argue they provide editing but now there are editors for hire to support indie writers.
Suggests Hachette may not be as innocent as they would have us believe
Unfortunately, from everything I've seen of people's book buying habits, especially online, books are consumer goods.
When the next book in a series arrives, there is no substitute. I would love to have seen someone trying to tell a Harry Potter reader that this other book is a substitute.
This is only because publishers enjoy an artificial monopoly on the production of specific works thanks to copyright. Without these limits, you would see a free market in competing editions of the same books, such as exists for books in the public domain.
The Iliad: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3D...
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=a9_asi_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Ahuckle...
No, I wouldn't because J. K. Rowling would have never wrote it since she couldn't make a living at it and wasn't independently wealthy.
cf. open source, fan fiction, wikipedia
Have you ever found fan fiction that spanned upwards of three hundred pages, was actually well written, and was not written for profit?
Looking a Linux, it seems most commits are by people getting paid.
And again, books are absolutely not commodities. Nobody is saying there's no difference between the preference for Harry Potter versus Percy Jackson or what have you. But Percy Jackson is certainly a close substitute for Harry Potter, so if the price difference between them is great enough, some readers will choose to read Percy Jackson instead of Harry Potter, and the number of readers for which this is true grows as the price difference does. This is also true if the supply of Harry Potter books is restricted. (This is the principle that makes small airport bookstores work, incidentally -- given the constrained supply of books available for purchase, airport book stores stock the most popular titles they can and figure that people will substitute their most preferred book that's available for the book they would purchase if the store carried a larger selection. And often enough, they do.)
And this is true for most goods. Android phones and iPhones are close substitutes for each other -- if you want one, that's the one you want, but if the price difference gets high enough, you'll go to the close substitute, and people vary in their level of price sensitivity. If the price of corn tortillas gets high enough, you'll start eating flour tortillas. And so on and so forth. This is pretty basic economics here.
I don't believe it is true much of the time. Maybe for technical books, but even then it is not because authors matter.
Picking between authors you like or have heard good things about is one thing, but they are not interchangeable. If I am waiting for the next in a series and I go to Amazon and they pull this crap then I will have to go elsewhere. The book is more important that a seller. If I want a certain painters art on my wall, I buy that print, not a "well Amazon didn't have that so I'll get a Fred".
"It is good to see Amazon acknowledge that its business decisions significantly affect authors’ lives."
Because when people aren't finding these books available through Amazon, or are finding them at a higher markup than other books, some of them aren't going to Barnes and Noble or Books-A-Million or to Actual Physical Bookstore to get them. Now, some of these missed purchase opportunities may simply be books that aren't sold at all, but some of them are going to be consumers buying other books. Because books are close substitutes for other books.
Just peruse any eBook catalog for a few minutes, try to detect trends. The vast, vast majority of books are pedestrian pieces in niche genres, genres whose readers are willing to buy just about everything in it.
The dirty secret is that this is not really that different from the traditional publishers. Read a paperback romance novel. Anyone who passed their college-level English composition classes with at least a C should be able to make a decent living as a writer. It really only takes churning out titles, which is easier than churning out software projects.
http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-af...