Slashdot Mirror
Authors Guild To Members: De-link Amazon.com
theodp writes: "Angered by Amazon.com's practice of offering [prominently placed] used editions of relatively new titles, the Authors Guild is urging authors to replace Amazon.com links on their web sites with links to Barnesandnoble.com and BookSense.com.
Amazon spokesperson Patty Smith insisted the policy really "ends up helping authors and publishers" although neither the author nor the publisher receives royalties from Amazon's used book sales, and Smith could not cite an author or genre helped by the availability of used editions.
" CD: I'd imagine they don't want us to go to our local used book stores either? This is the second time they've tried to call Amazon to task for this.
... to be sold on the "used" list, the books had to have been bought, right? Which means the author already got their share of the sale. If this is after-market purchasing, it falls under classic copyright laws, which give the owner the right to sell such material for whatever price they deem. I can see their point of "prominently placing" the link to used books next to newer releases, but maybe it's just me: I never buy used books. :) Unless it's a school text, does anyone? Something my father got me into, I guess, only because I saw the state of his books post-read... nicotine stains, bits of crumbs in the bindings... eaugh. ...
First time posting, release the hounds!
But, on the other hand, I haven't bought a book or CD new in the past 4 years or so. This is in protest of the collaboration and price fixing between publishers. I figure if they try to screw me, I'll find a legal way that hurts them in the pockets. So the ban on direct linkage, while it may appear to be a good idea for the authors, will only hurt the effectiveness of their site. I'll just end up going to half.com or Amazon anyway, and ignore their site completely.
Anyway, if the authors want more money/any money at all from used book sales, they should publish themselves, because the large publishing houses would hardly like to share a new source of income. I'd be glad to buy a book new even if it did cost a little more from an author who publishes independently a la Edward Tufte.
Through DMCA and other legislation, and now pressure from authors, the doctrine of first sale is dying a slow and horrible death.
I personally will make all of my future online book purchases from Tattered Cover.
How quickly we forget who is standing up for our rights.
Well, I've recently bought a copy of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. This is original book of the brilliant film, a film which for me is probably the best horror ever made.
Has he lost his mind, I hear Slashdotters say? No, I haven't. I'm not talking about the recent effects-driven dross, I'm talking about one of the edgiest, psychological non-gore horrors that have been filmed.
Sadly, my new book's cover is splattered with "Now a major motion picture!"-type idiocy all over it, and the 'major' picture they refer to is the recent poor quality remake. I have the actors from this 1999 abomination all across the top, whereas I'd prefer to simply erase all knowledge of the film's existence from my memory.
Now, I definitely would have paid extra for an older copy of the book which had a non-film based cover. Sadly, one wasn't available in a reasonable amount of time and so I've ended up with the new cover.
Just one personal example as to why people are sometimes willing to pay for more for older copies.
Cheers,
Ian
Can I expect to see pickets of authors next time I go to a library?
I don't know what it's like in the USA, but at least in Holland it is not logical for authors to go picket libraries, since at least in here libraries pay a fee to a foundation that distributes it over the authors. Second I want to mention that real booklovers that read more books then they can afford still buy the books they really like even if it is just because that will allow them lo lend a book to friends and convince them a particular author is very good. Being the secretary of a student's library myself I know a lot of fanatic readers that are big bookbuyers.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK, Canada and Australia, authors get paid according to how frequently their books are withdrawn in libraries. The amount is pathetically small, but it's there.
My favorite quote:
"We asked could we at least talk about when something could become available as a used book? Could we maybe wait three months after the book was published?" said Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers. "The biggest problem is that it is legal, I think. I wring my hands, pound my desk and say, `Aargh.'"
Easy solution: outlaw used book sales. As the RIAA/MPAA have shown, convenient new laws can be bought on Capitol Hill. It's time for the Association of American Publishers to pay up....
I'd imagine they don't want us to go to our local used book stores either?
That's an unfair characterisation of their position. Agree with it or not, the guild isn't against second hand sales per se, just Amazon's agressive marketing of second-hand sales through an ebay-style system that sits alongside new book sales. This is great for Amazon, because it picks up a commission for every sale without taking any of the risk involved with new sales - it doesn't have to warehouse inventory or administer the sale to the same degree.
What must be galling for authors is that most people using Amazon will be searching for their books in the expectation they will be buying a new copy. With this option, potential new book buyers are lured to buy a used book, so no royalties.
Barnes and Noble offer a slightly similar option, but through used book shops, and further removed from the book buying process, but then B&N has larger warehousing than Amazon and so is probably more concerned with turnover.
Anyhow there are better ways of finding (cheaper) used books - the best being abebooks.com, a co-operative of used book shops around the world. It's great.
Being an author myself, I can sympathize with the Author's Guild. I spent a great deal of time on my book and just barely made any money off of it to begin with. Had Amazon had this at the time my book came out, I may have never made a dime.
Unlike movies and CDs, authors main source of benefit from a book is usually the book itself, and if new copies don't sell, the author doesn't make any money.
With CDs, this isn't really a significant source of income for most musicians. They tend to make most of their money from touring. Movies tend to make most of their money from theatres and selling to video stores (who then rent).
Authors, unfortunately, usually don't have another source of income from their books.
That said, there have been used book stores for years, and there should be. There are certainly a lot of out of print books that are made available through this channel that is invaluable to book collectors. If you allow this, you simply have to allow any book to be bought used.
Then there's Amazon.com. They're a company that is trying to make money. That's their job. They have an obligation to their shareholders to do the best they can to make money. Failure to do that, especially after they've clearly shown that it's a source of income for them, could actually make them liable to stockholders. They'd have to somehow show to their stockholders that the overall benefit would be to remove this feature (such as the Actors Guild putting together a big enough campaign against Amazon to cost them more to implement it than it makes them).
As an author, I'm torn, but when it comes down to it, Amazon is doing the right thing for them. They have to try to make money.
Computers have greatly reduced the time involved in writing, editing, typesetting and printing books since the days of writing a book with a typewriter. Distribution, sales and shipping of books have also been accelerated by technology (printing in more than one location, nearly realtime sales information across entire store chains, etc.).
Technology also means that the opportunities that copyright impedes have greatly increased. Being able to freely copy material online means that many people do not have to chop down trees to store information. Physical storage of books in digital forms is much more compact. Searching and sharing of free online information is orders of magnitudes easier.
There is even a secondary opportunity cost to authors in long copyrights: the development of derivative works is greatly limited by copyright when they are outside of "fair use." For example, I think that, given how much time has elapsed, Richard Hatch should be allowed to make his Battlestar Galactica sequel, and the rewrite of Gone with the Wind from a black perspective (The Wind Done Gone) should be allowed whether or not the book qualifies as a parody. The opportunities lost by impeding this sharing are increased when the efficiency with which these derivative works can be made is increased (i.e., more potential derivative works that otherwise would be produced are lost during each year of the copyright).
The costs of creating a book have dropped. The rate at which that investment can be recovered has accelerated, and opportunities that we lose during each year of copyright have increased. In my view, the balance point at which the public benefit of copyright is maximized has been greatly reduced. I believe that it would maximize public benefit to accelerate copyright expiration to about five years, maybe even less.
Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
if you are at all interested in getting into the used book trade, i recommend a great book. Its a book about books. They also talk about the different used book sites, the cheapest, etc...
Used and Rare
by Lawrence Goldstone, Nancy Goldstone
You can find the book here
--------------------------------------------
Customers are taking to many free napkins...
ZZZTTTT, that is SEPERATE,
I need to look at nothing but the back room filled with Amazon shipping materials.
My mom does approx 5k a month through amazon, its not bad,
Market place is SEPERATE and DIFFERENT, there complete descriptions, of the same books are listed for a direct purchase, the cut is different.
You have absolutley no clue what you are talking about.
The above informationholds true if you purchase it through Marketplace, it does NOT if you order the same book through their main interface while searching, althought the book will return both results.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
I ordered a copy of book 3 of George RR Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series from amazon.co.uk (on the Voyager imprint) since it's not available here yet. Inside on the copyright notice page is a EULA which basically says that the first sale doctrine does not apply and the book is only to be sold new.
What. The. Hell...
People work pretty hard to drive traffic to Amazon, and Amazon benefits greatly. For example, on my website in March, there were fifteen thousand clicks over to Amazon, 223 items were purchased, and I earned about $200.
Amazon had this nice working agreement with their many associates, and then they started dicking around with their pages. First they changed the way the pages were displayed, making it less likely to get a "direct" sale to earn that 15% commission.
But the real kicker came when they added the used books, because Amazon does not pay referral fees on used item sales. So those associates who put a lot of work into linking to Amazon are getting nothing in return.
It doesn't bother me too much, because I mainly link to give my readers some additional info - the money is just an added bonus (but it does pay for the web fees); however, other people who build a business off of these fees are pissed at Amazon.
In conclusion, I think the author's guild is off base in its reasons for telling members to delink Amazon, but if their members are getting revenue from the Amazon associates program, they might do well by linking to another store.
We all hate the RIAA and MPAA, right? We always make the argument that they are trying to prohibit the first-sale doctrine, right? Why is it suddenly a bad thing when Amazon makes it more efficient to exercise your first-sale rights with books?
As with digital media, the real problem is that initial production and distribution in the current model presents too high a barrier to entry. The producers (record companies, publishers, etc.) end up making the lion's share of the money. We constantly make the argument that if musicians were able to cut out the record companies they would be able to make money even selling at a much lower price -- a price that more people would be willing to pay rather than filesharing.
It's time to apply that theory to book publishing. If authors were able to go to low volume, on-demand micropublishers instead of the large publishing houses, they could sell their books for a tenth the price and still make money. The market for used books would be much less, because at $3 for a new book, who wants to waste the money on shipping a used one?
Nope, no sig
To: staff@authorsguild.com
Subject: Pressing Amazon.com to alter its marketing of used books
Dear Authors Guild,
I have read your letter to Jeffrey Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, and am appalled at your position. Are you next going to attack public libraries for making books freely available for loan, or individuals for loaning a book to a friend? After all, these loans "earn no payment for the authors and publishers of the books in question", meaning that, according to you, "book authors and publishers aren't adequately compensated for their work", "directly harming authors and publishers".
Clearly, this is ludicrious, but it is the logical next step for your position, which apparently desires a pay-per-use model. Since you have chosen to advise your members to de-link Amazon.com and instead use Barnesandnoble.com and "especially" BookSense.com, I will advise my friends, family, and associates to avoid purchasing new books by your members, and instead patronize used book stores, the Amazon.com Marketplace, and especially public libraries for books by your members.
In general, it's the making a copy part that's prohibited, not the what you do with it. You can buy a work and give it away on the NET, so long as you don't make a copy in the process. When you figure out how to do that, let us know.
This is an excellent point which is often overlooked, but it goes much deeper. Think about state of the art computing ten years ago (1992). The 386's were just begining to gain popularity, and Windows 95 was just a proposal on Microsoft's 5 year plan. If you were "computer literate" back then, you likely bought (or otherwise acquired) some software to run on it. How much of that software do you still have? How much of it will still run on any sort of computer you still have access to?
Go back another decade to 1982, the era of the Commodore Vic20 and the Timex/Sinclair ZX80/ZX81. Apple's Macintosh wouldn't hit the market for another two years yet; their Apple ][ was dominant. How much of that software do you still have? How much of it will still run on any sort of computer you still have access to today? Emulation is fair game.
And that's just looking twenty years into the past.
Now think about electronic media going forward. You know that eBook you bought last week? Do you think your eBook reader will still be running 10 years from now? 20 years? Do you think your license will still be valid? What about that DVD? How long do you suppose you have before the 'new and improved' DVD players won't play the 2002-format DVD's, even if you've kept them in mint condition? And you can bet DMCA-like laws will make emulation a non-option.
Now go to your bookshelf and see if you can find a book with a copyright date in the 1992 or 1982 era. Got some? Can you still read them? Is the information still relevant? Heck, I've got magazines from back then, some of which I haven't got around to reading yet. I've got paperback (disposable) books from the 60's. I have hardcover books a century older than those. In many cases, the publisher is long out of business, but fortunately my license (and ability) to read those books is not dependent on the publisher being around.
I can't fault the authors or publishers for choosing the more money option over the less money option, and I guess they think there's more money for them if a new copy is sold over an old copy being resold. But what we see here again is the age old truism that businesses like dumb consumers. Where education will lead the consumers to purchase less product, a business has only one incentive to educate or inform: competition. This is why the Author's Guild is reacting against Amazon; in this case, Amazon is providing a service which is beneficial to consumers at the (percieved) expense of the members of the Author's Guild. It also shows how important competition and the free exchange of information has become in this new wired world, and how damaging a monopolistic construction, or the obstruction of free information flow can be.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Yes, this group represents all writers who join, in the same way Congress represents the US citizenry. The phrase "tyrrany of the majority" comes to mind. It's a committee, with all that that entails.
The Guild requested members not link to Amazon. Individual members can decide whether or not to comply.
Personally, I will comply. Here's why.
As a new author with my third book coming out, I have a simple goal: make a living doing something I enjoy. Some people enjoy systems administration, or get the warm fuzzies from nursing or working in a pet shop. I want you to read my stuff. If you enjoy it, I want you to buy more of it. As an author, it's my job to make damned sure you enjoy it. Used bookstores assist in this goal, for reasons detailed elsewhere in this discussion.
I would prefer you bought my books new. I would also prefer that my publisher paid me a royalty of $500 per copy sold. And, while I'm at it, I'd like a pony.
These days, the economics of writing are harsh. We're being squeezed by publishers in the same way users are being squeezed by publishers. (I'm very lucky to have a publisher who is not only reasonable, but downright generous. It's also a small company, which explains a lot.) The DMCA is a weapon to be used against users, but the publishing contract is a weapon to be used against writers. When you have a one-on-one relationship, and one party is freakin' huge compared to the other, the big guy don't needs laws to enforce his will.
If your name isn't headline material, you're shafted. The advance on a novel in 1960 was about three thousand dollars. The advance on a novel in 2000 was about three thousand dollars. You do the math.
As an outhor, not linking to Amazon is a good idea. There are other vendors that will sell books that will put more money in my pocket. In this context, asking Amazon to not display used books so prominently is reasonable.
It's also reasonable for Amazon to say no.
The real problem here is the majority of publishing companies. More books are published, by volume, than ever before. Fewer individual authors are published than ever before. Most of the books on the Web are crap -- the technical content is OK, but when was the last time you read a good, new, Web-only novel? The "publishing explosion" of Web stuff is simply an explosion of compost with a few diamonds strewn through it.
I long for the day when print-on-demand becomes possible for mainstream distribution, and new authors can have their works available. But by that time, the publishing companies will have tightened the "standard contract" so far that an author will no longer own their own work. It's already happening, much as it happened to the music business.
I think I wasn't very clear. When I said;
"I think with the NET law you can't make copies and give them away either"
I wasn't talking about NET as in the Internet, I meant "The No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1997".
Here's a quote from a page on cryptome ( http://cryptome.org/bauchner.htm );
"The legislation highlights the concerns of businesses who fear the dissolution of their market model. Prior to the Act, individuals who did not profit from copyright infringement were not subject to criminal sanctions. The NET Act, criminalizes the willful distribution of at least $1000 worth of copyrighted material in any 180 day period."
You should probably read the entire page. It's a little dry, but very enlightening.
Infringing copyright had to be done for commercial gain. If you gave it away, you were legal. If you were a company and gave it away to boost sales of another product, that was for commercial gain, and you were illegal.
People ripping CD-ROMs and trading them on Napster were legal before the NET act. After all it wasn't done for comercial gain (except perhaps Napster's).
Sorry for my lack of clarity.
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
If you've got a rate of inflation of 7.5%, your prices *will* double in ten years. With 3%, you're still only looking at twenty four years. There's a reason people say "twenty years ago, this would have cost half what it does now"!
...
Also remember that materials are not the entire bottom line of the publishing industry. Authors, pinters, managers, marketeers, advertisers, etc. need to be paid more every year
What is unjustified is when you get an enforced manufacturer's recommended price, combined with cheaper methods of manufacturing, and the benefits not passed on to the consumer.
"A book with the cover ripped off" describes a very, very small part of the remainder business. You're also wrong about publishers suing, the illegality of selling remaindered books, and whether it's hard to spot a remaindered book. And both Amazon and Half.com sell a vast number of remaindered books every day.
A remaindered book is essentially "publisher's overstock" which is made up of unsold returns from retailers, books that have been damaged in shipping ("hurts") and books that were never sold from the publisher's warehouses in the first place. The publishers then liquidate those books by selling them to remainder dealers for pennies on the dollar. The remainder dealers are then free to resell them however they like. Where do you think B&N stores get the "bargain books" they sell in the front of all their stores nowadays?
Oftentimes, remaindered books are in NO WAY different than the original. Other times, publishers will put a remainder mark (a line drawn in black marker) on the bottom of the book to indicate it is a remainder. In cases where the value of the book is very small (mass market paperbacks are a good example) and the book has little resale value, retailers are asked to just rip the covers off the books and return the covers to save shipping costs.
A few patent issues here.
First, a patent is very limited in duration. It only seems to last forever with computer software since everything is obsolete a year after it comes out.
Second, when you patent a molecule, you patent it for a specific use - and you have to show that you have some reason to believe the molecule will be useful for the purpose you suggest.
Also important to note is that a molecule is more than just a combination of elements - it is a combination of elements in a particular arrangement. Most drugs are a combination of just carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, with maybe some sulfur or chlorine occassionally present. However, two molecules can contain the same ratio of elements and be completely different in structure and identity. You will find that the number of possible molecules containing a given number of atoms is quite large indeed. An analogy is a chess game - there are only 32 pieces on a 64 square board, but there are more ways to play the game than there are atoms in the known universe.
Interestingly enough, much of modern drug discovery takes place in a manner similar to what you describe. Alas, the start-trek machine doesn't exist, so it is a lot more limited. Even with a high degree of automation the process is still VERY expensive, and highly reliant on people to figure out how to tell if a given molecule will work against a particular disease. Put simply, at this point most of the easy-to-cure diseases have already been cured.
And as far as Discovery reverse-engineering drugs goes, they don't really need to do that. The nature of drug-regulation and patent law dictates that many of the most essential details involved in making a drug are a matter of public record. While the secret of a candy bar is labelled "natural and artifical flavors", a drug is labelled with the precise molecular identity of the active ingredient. This is how countries like India can copy brand-name drugs for a tiny fraction of the original cost to develop them.
I have a simple illustration for the cost of drugs. The first pill costs $600 million, the rest cost about 50 cents apiece. Alas - nobody would ever buy the first pill at that price, and so the cost has to be spread out. If you deny a company the ability to spread the cost out, then you will never see a new drug again, unless you are willing to fork out $500 million in charity.