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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> Rather read works by people who are creating for the sake of art, and not money.

So basically the independently wealthy.

Point of information: back before I got the opportunity to write novels for a living, it took me 3-4 years to write one on a part-time/hobbyist/learning-the-art basis. That's because I had a day job, which came first.

As someone who is earning a living by writing, I typically produce a book a year, plus change (sometimes up to two books per year).

If downward pressure on production costs results in me having to seek work elsewhere, then of course I won't stop writing ... but I'll write a lot less.

Amazon's strategy of driving down prices by leaning on publishers to cap prices across the board works on the assumption that all books are created equal. It's commodification, equating work of serious artistic or literary merit, or work that lots of people like, with work that is neither artistic, meritorious, or even popular. If the monopsonist gets their way, then all authors take a haircut. Even if you're a market fundamentalist, this has problems: Amazon may be sending a price signal, but it doesn't apply to the individual SKU but instead to the manufacturers' entire product range across the board. Any useful information is thus lost in the noise ...

> It's commodification, equating work of serious artistic or literary merit, or work that lots of people like, with work that is neither artistic, meritorious, or even popular.

Books have a high up front cost and low unit cost. This means that quadrupling sales is better than doubling prices and books "that lots of people like" will always be dramatically more successful than books that are "neither artistic, meritorious, or even popular". There is no risk of the type of commodification you are worried about.

I think there is a valid point to be made about books of serious artistic or literary merit losing out as we shift focus to books that lots of people like.

The problem is, there doesn't seem to be much elasticity in the size of the market. Books are rivalrous goods: an hour spent reading book A is an hour you can't spend reading book B, or watching a movie. And a lot of people prefer to watch movies -- or play computer games, or kick a ball around -- to reading books for recreation. Unless we can work out how to convince more people that reading for pleasure is fun then we're in danger of disappearing into a zero-sum or negative-sum game: it's a gradually dwindling recreation, in the very long term, simply because of the increasing number of competing recreational activities. (NB: This is not a bad thing per se, it's only bad in the context of declining book consumption.)

Put it another way: posit that there is a constant number X readers out there who want to buy the next Charlie Stross novel. Is it a better strategy for me to pursue sales at a higher price point, or lower? Now posit that I might acquire more readers by lowering my price point ... but is it a linear relationship? Will I get my hypothetical profits back by deep discounting?

Answers on the back of a postcard, please. (Bearing in mind that actually doing the experiment is highly dangerous, because that's an entire year's income stream you're jeopardizing if you get it wrong.)

I don't have numbers, but I'd take a guess that Amazon, with the Kindle, has done a decent job of expanding the market some.

I know I read about 10 times as much (including a few of yours, thank you!) as before getting one, although I'm probably an extreme case because it's slow and expensive to get English-language books here in Italy.

This quote, from upstream in the thread, makes sense to me:

> Removing legacy middlemen is healthy. Skewing producers' bargaining rights is not. Disentangling publishers' rents (the fraction of publishers' profits which come from them being, before Amazon, authors' only choice for distribution) from authors' costs of production (what good authors need to be paid to compensate them for the time, skill and risk which goes into writing) is difficult.

You doubtless have a closer seat to the action and more skin in the game - do you think there is already an effect on authors? To me it seems a bit too early to tell exactly what is happening where, with who, with certainty. I don't see Amazon trying to squeeze so hard that it strangles authors, but I suppose they're big enough they might well do stupid stuff inadvertently.

I think books are great value for what you pay in terms of entertainment, and I'm a pretty fast reader.

Its an error to assume folks actually READ the books they buy. I have a tall stack of books I'll get around to reading. I paid for them all of course.

Anecdotally: Guilty as charged, on both accounts.

I also have a physical stack of unread books, which I'll probably never get around to read now that I have a Kindle, created mostly due to impulse buying on bookstores. Some I also bought again digitally.

I'm now growing my virtual kindle queue, faster than I can read, but with a different approach: I added all my wishlist authors (including cstross, incidentally) to ereaderiq, which notifies me of price drops, and buy 1.99 daily deals or similar range. So far I got very good deals on good titles of Arthur Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and so on.

So, again, anecdotally, I might buy things that I'll never read, but the amount of titles that I haven't read is bigger than my daily reading time, and after a certain quality threshold, titles seem mostly interchangeable.

I'd guess the best price point is the one just on 'impulse buy'.

I think it's also an error to assume this really has any bearing on what Charlie was talking about. This gets into the "I once dove to the bottom of the ocean and brought back a pretty shell, so that's a viable place to open a curio shop" fallacy. The fact that a subset of readers will buy a few more books than they'll read doesn't mean that books are ultimately non-rival goods. Unless there are a large number of potential consumers with effectively unlimited willingness to buy books, the pie is still very much fixed in size despite a couple of pieces being very slightly bigger than others.

Hey! Of course it wasn't what Charlie was talking about. It was me, adding to the conversation. Chill!