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Authors' Amazon Awareness
Geoffrey.landis writes "Many book lovers were surprised this week when Amazon.com removed books from the publisher Macmillan from the shelves (later restored), including such popular imprints as St. Martin's, Henry Holt, and the science fiction publisher Tor. But readers shouldn't have been surprised, according to the Author's Guild. The Author's Guild lists a history of earlier instances where Amazon stopped listing a publisher's books in order to pressure them to accept terms, dating back to early in 2008, when Amazon removed the 'buy' buttons for works from the British publisher Bloomsbury, representing such authors as William Boyd, Khaled Hosseini, and J.K. Rowling. In response, the Author's Guild has set up a service called Who Moved My Buy Button to alert authors when their books are removed from Amazon's lists."
Amazon's actions have generated ill-will on the parts of many authors, who — being authors — are only too happy to explain their viewpoints at length. Two such examples are Tobias Buckell's breakdown of why Amazon isn't the righteous defender of low-prices they claim to be and Charlie Stross's round-up of the situation.
And to think that I helped Mary Ann North become rich paying $.75 per paperback. Of all the parties beating their breasts in outrage over this issue the only ones I have any sympathy for are the authors and the readers.
Saw this debate start earlier this week on Schlock Mercenary's site http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2010/02/04/dear-mister-bezos-are-you-still-all-mad-and-stuff/. Seems like the author found the discussion heading away from the self-righteous line he wanted and killed it.
Don't think he realized how many of his readers are consumers who want the best price for something.
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From TFA:
"I don't like to do business with people who, apparently as far as I can tell, think sucker punching you when they disagree, even if they have the right to do it, is the way to go about this."
I found it affirms my opinion of the situation. YMMV. As in many of these type of debates, your opinion is balanced against a very small subset of idealists who will let moral issues influence their business dealings.
That's what.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Except that Amazon has nothing even near a monopoly on books, whether electronic, paper, or audio. There are many other online vendors that would jump at the chance to have a major product line Amazon doesn't.
Regardless, Amazon is absolutely right to negotiate with the price-gouging publishers any way they see fit, using any leverage they can. The publishers are trying to use their exclusive rights to the books; why shouldn't Amazon use their exclusive rights to their store? They are not harming the market, or keeping anything from being sold.
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I think a "RENT THIS BOOK INDEFINITELY" would be clearer. People aren't familiar with licensing copyrighted works. "Rent" is a term they understand well, and would respond appropriately to, as in "What, I'm paying $14.99 for something I don't even own, can't sell, and might lose access to if your company changes management?"
Stross writes:
I'm so confused. Here I am with a paperback that says $7.99 on its back. An ebook costs a fraction of that to manufacture and the paperback's price also includes all the amortized costs (like paying the author!) in its price, so how the fuck is $9.99 "cheap"?
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"Why have publishers?"
Because the authors want them. They provide useful services.
You might want to read some of the links in the article. They contain information about where all the money goes and why authors use publishers.
Book's most often require editing, fact checking, layout, artwork - even hiring a set of on the cheap professionals this will cost thousands.
Or you can go down to your local college and higher a couple people for next to nothing and end up with the same quality.
It's sad, but unfortunately the trend seems to indicate that you're right. Many publishers used to do multiple levels of editing, detailed proofreading, etc. The process in some sense required it, because you had to move from a typescript page (or even handwritten) by an author to a typeset page, and in the process, things had to be checked. Nowadays, even large publishers have cut out many stages, and some appear to do little more than dump the text from a computer file into a layout app, do 15 minutes of design, and get ready to publish. If there were errors, the author has to catch them. And I've seen a number of cases where proofs don't seem to matter -- things that an author corrects in proofs go uncorrected in the final copy, because it's too much of a pain to go through those corrections in detail and make changes in a format that is often different from the application the author is using (or the one that is being used to track changes).
Designing, typesetting, and making a book used to be so much more labor-intensive and time-consuming in the past. Yet I look at such books published decades ago all the time, and generally the quality is quite high. Why is it, then, that I see more poorly-designed books these days with typographical errors on every page?