Slashdot Mirror
Bookstores May Boycott New Amazon-Published Books
destinyland writes "Amazon has begun signing their own authors and then publishing the books themselves, leaving booksellers 'wary' as Amazon 'tries to have it all,' according to a Boston newspaper. The co-owner of an independent bookstore near Cambridge considered boycotting Amazon's new line of books, complaining, 'They are a huge competitor, and they don't collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage.' A children's bookstore noted that 'the pie is getting cut into fewer pieces. I'd be nervous if I were an adult book publisher.' Borders bookstore has already declared bankruptcy, leaving The Daily Show to joke that bookstores should simply become 'digital downloading' stations — or a 'living history' museum where future generations can learn what a 'magazine rack' was."
They're being destroyed, and all they have left is snark.
I'd be nervous if I were an adult book publisher
Adult movie publishers seem to be doing OK.
Just ask the people who deliver ice to houses.
There we go again... Is this the correct chronological order of ascension to evilness: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon...?
All that the "independents" in my area offer is the same junk as in the supermarket "best-sellers" list or remaindered copies of over-hyped books.
Ask them to order-in something different and they claim "that is out of print" and perhaps I would prefer some garbage written by Jeremy Clarkson as that is also filed in the Transport section.
Let them die.
The article identifies ONE well-selling book. Amazon has been doing print-on-demand and e-publishing for thousands of hacks already, and even for some algorithms that do nothing but mash Wikipedia pages together. I really wouldn't be surprised if this ends up working more as leverage for those services than to pounce on the next big authors.
What competing bookstores? There's Barnes and Noble, and a few remaining independents. Borders is in bankruptcy liquidation. ("Everything must go! 40-60% off! Store fixtures for sale.) Barnes and Noble is in financial trouble. When they go, there won't be much left.
When the big guys give it up, the distribution channel dries up.All the warehousing and shipping needed to service little bookstores isn't profitable if the volume is too small.
Bookstores are going the way of record stores and video rental stores. Gone. It's sad, but probably inevitable.
Are they being blacklisted because their book is full of porn ads like your link?
And the worms ate into his brain.
They are a huge competitor, and they don't collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage
No Amazon has an "unfair advantage" over an independent book store because:
a) It doesn't have sales staff who spend most of their time not actually doing anything.
b) Doesn't pay prime commercial rents on its facilities.
c) Has a collection so vast that no physical book store could compete.
d) Is a huge corporation so purchasing, HR, marketing, shipping etc is amortised by the sheer volume they sell.
e) Is a huge corporation and negotiates favourable tax breaks with state and federal authorities.
Amazon doesn't want to pay state taxes not because paying them would make them unprofitable, but because working out the taxes for 50 US states plus all the other countries they ship to (who would probably start demanding tax collection if Amazon caved to the states) is an unholy nightmare.
Bricks-and-mortar stores need to stop whining about on-line businesses not paying sales taxes, and need to start restructuring their businesses to deal with advantages that huge retailers like Amazon have. Here in Australia the b&m retailers are whining that imports under $1000AUD don't pay 10% sales tax, completely ignoring that those goods are generally 30% - 50% cheaper then the same product from a b&m store. A 3% - 5% price increase on those imports isn't going to save b&m stores.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Sure, you can boycott Amazon published books, but then anyone wanting to buy Amazon published books in an old-style bookstore will have to in effect partially boycott you and bring their business elsewhere. The customer is king, not old-style bookstores indicating why they're on their way to the dustbin of history due to self-destructive business practices.
If Amazon aren't required to pay it, that's the fault of unfair legislation, not of the company itself. And here in the UK they do charge VAT*, as they do in many other countries they trade in, so it's a bit misleading to say they don't pay the tax at all.
And it's not like there's anything stopping these bookstores setting up online shops and reaping the same tax benefits - except bitching about Amazon is a lot easier than trying to compete directly with them. Pitch the two on the same playing field and it's clear Amazon will be the winner, as they're the ones with the USP.
* - there's a small loophole allowing stuff to be shipped from Guernsey VAT-free which Amazon uses for some items, but that's due to be closed up at some point.
Bookstores are going the way of record stores and video rental stores.
Isn't this really more about publishers than bookstores, though?
If Amazon is effectively positioning itself as the entire supply chain from author to reader, a lot of middlemen are going to get cut out, which in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing if they no longer serve a useful purpose but cream a bit off the top anyway.
However, given that Amazon have little credible competition for two major sales channels (on-line ordering of paper books, and distribution of e-books), there is a very real danger here that this series of events will follow:
Rather like DRM and AAA games, we are in danger of being left with no-one producing good work that you can simply pay for and enjoy any more, just mediocrity with strings attached.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Isn't this really more about publishers than bookstores, though?
It is. We'll probably still have a publishing industry, but it will publish the few mass-market titles that appear in racks at non-bookstore retailers, like drug stores and supermarkets. Everything else will be remote-order or on line only. For those books, the publisher has a very limited role and function.
You are quite right!
Slashdot has spent a lot of mindshare on the evils of the Music biz, but not too far behind that the book industry was pretty nasty too.
However I will go out on a limb and say that Borders deserved to croak for missing the boat TWICE. Not only did they goof giving the online side to Amazon, but they missed the REASON Amazon was beating them - centralized selection. But come on gang, can we admit to ourselves how totally crappy it is to order a book on amazon and have to wait for it to be delivered?!
What Borders missed the chance for, and the media blanked the stories about, is Print On Demand. It's been carefully slammed as "eew, why would you do that?". But books are digital, right? All Borders (or Barnes & Noble - they should have had a vision meeting and worked on it *Together!*) had to do, was invest in a beautiful untouchable-quality POD system. "Can't find that obscure book that only did a 7,000 copy small press run? We'll print it for you in an hour!" (You do need the hour, getting a book that doesn't fall apart does need time for the pages to be cut and fit and glued right.)
The shelf selection would be a Lead-In sample, just to get people thinking of what they want. The POD could also fix gaps in series etc. On and on. And yes, the systems are here - Harvard University Bookstore has one. In my hand are three sample Google-Books editions of some very rare Buddhist books, one of which answered a theory question I had for five years. A year ago they had some cover art licensing gaps, so it has only a blue white text cover, but that's irrelevant. The book is REAL, and equal quality to standard paperbacks.
So THIS is the true casualty of the Intellectual Property bickering. But the forces that be missed the chance. POD is coming, and the first company to nail it will re-write publishing.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This is good news. Hopefully, Amazon will start publishing school textbooks, too, at a fraction of the overinflated price that conventional publishers currently charge.
Better yet, publish them as e-books and sell Kindles to school boards.
There is a borders within a half mile walk from my apartment. It's in a high densitiy urban setting along with a plethora of other shops, two movie theaters, numerous restauraunts, etc.
Everytime I'm out on a leisurely stroll, I go in and browse throught the Philosophy, Religion, Politics, History, and IT sections. They very rarely have anything I want to read. With the bankruptcy, I've been stopping in more often as they get new shipments from their warehouse. After four visits, they finally had one title I was willing to buy for the price they offered, a paperback reprint of William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Meanwhile, at Amazon, they have a metric truckload of independent affiliates offering rare and hard to find titles. I can find the out of print /Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy/ by Dvornik from one reseller or Dominic O'Meara's /Platonopolis/ by another. Amazon offers an interface that allows me to browse the titles of a multitude of independent bookstores that cater to my tastes. Borders never offered that.
So what we're actually seeing is the death of mass-market booksellers in preference to sellers that allow independent affiliates that specialize in various niches to prosper.
I'll take that over Borders anyday.
In all seriousness, if you have a problem with this trend, produce something good and sell it in physical form. Or open a book store. Just because a lot of the culture is shifting this direction doesn't mean that one or two people with a vision can't start a movement in the other direction, if they can convince enough people.
Personally I don't see physical books vanishing anytime soon. Until they provide contracts equivalent to what you can do with paper books, libraries will still have a need for physical copies. And personally I prefer to buy things in hardcopy when they're anything that I expect to take seriously.
In all seriousness though, how many people really pass books down to their children anymore? Society's changed... physical tokens of personal expression aren't nearly what they once were, and I honestly think that's a good thing in the long run. Being less attached to hauling around physical delivery media like books and CDs also leads to less attachment to random things like cars and trinkets, and more emphasis on experiences and ideas. Even if Amazon does pull whatever random book you personally connect with (which is so unlikely to happen it's approaching impossible in the first place) that doesn't remove any of the impact the book had on your life. And on the other side, self-publishing an ebook may be the only way for someone who writes your favorite book ever to start a career.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Sorry, those were Federal, not state, programs
I was referring more generally to a compulsory political institution that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory. This includes both sovereign states and states within a federal system.
Why does browsing a few web pages and downloading a 400-800kb file require broadband?
From the summary: "I'd be nervous if I were an adult book publisher." I imagine that books with a lot of skin-tone illustrations are bigger than 800 kB.
"Hello Mr Bookstore Owner, I'm looking for Big New Amazon Thriller."
"Oh, you can't buy that here. We don't sell Amazon books. Amazon are evil."
"So you're not going to sell me the books I want to buy?"
"No. If you want to buy Amazon books you'll have to buy them from Amazon, or the bookstore down the road which does stock them."
"Well, guess I won't be buying anything from you in future then."
With policies this retarded it's no wonder so many bookstores are going bust.
When on this subject, I always recall that great movie "You've Got Mail", where a small "Shop Around The Corner" is out-foxed by a big chain. "Can we save the Shop Around The Corner?" Asks Kathleen Kelley and the crowd goes wild. Of course, while offering verbal encouragement, the crowd continues to not offer its business. Is that evil? Uncharitable? Unwise? "I've heard Joe Fox compare books to olive oil", says Kathleen Kelley. Kathleen Kelley is a walking encyclopedia on the subject of children's books and can offer you advice on what to read with your kids. Kathleen Kelley hosts a reading hour to get kids interested in reading. Kathleen Kelley knows who you are and always offers service with a smile. Is it worth it?
The Shop Around The Corner employs four people: the owner, Kathleen Kelley, and two college students. Let's peg decent wages for them at, say, $100000, $60000, and 2x$20000. In New York, you can barely live on this. Let's add rent on the place at $20000/year, and other miscellaneous expenses of $20000/year on business license, electricity, insurance, whatever. That comes to $240000/year, $960/day. "Is that why it costs so much?" "That's why it's worth so much." The store is open, say, 12 hours a day, 8am-8pm. That's $80/hour, or $1.33/minute. How fast can you check out? Friendly service with a smile takes time.
Small shops can get away with higher markup. The books, after all, are already there, so there's an expectation of immediate satisfaction which can tolerate a higher price. Let's say $10 markup for hardcovers and $2 on paparbacks, which is just barely on the line between making a profit and losing your customers. If an average customer buys a hardcover and two paperbacks, each checkout nets you $14. You need to get a customer like that every 10 minutes to get the aforementioned income level. Now, if you've ever been to a small bookstore, you'd know that they are usually empty. I don't know if people hate books, or what, but I've never seen more than ten people in a store at once, and that's a crowd. That was twenty years ago. I imagine now things are even worse. I can not imagine how anyone can run a small bookstore profitably.
What exactly do you get at "Shop Around The Corner" that you do not get on Amazon? Customer service. If you are the kind who likes to chat, to ask advice, and to receive books from a real human being, that must be invaluable to you. Only, can't you get better social interaction by spending time with your friends? Ok, there's also advice about what to read. After all, Kathleen Kelley knows everything. Well, that's why we have friends who tell us what we might like, book clubs, review sites, and amazon lists and recommendations. Ok, but isn't it nice to pick up a real book, feel the binding, smell the pages, and flip through it to see if what's inside? A nice thing to have indeed, but is it really worth a $10 markup?
The bottom line is: you go to the bookstore to buy a book. You don't need to go there to socialize or to ask advice. You just need the book. Amazon gets you the book with minimum overhead, so you can spend that money you saved on something you like instead of on keeping Kathleen Kelley in business. Oh, by the way, the author of the book is surely more important to you than she is, and the authors get 40% royalties when they publish on Amazon, and maybe 10% elsewhere (if they haggle real hard). Isn't it better to reward the creators rather than useless, but nice, middlemen?
This is pretty much the fear of most people I know who are into books and know about amazon. This effect will be slowed down by libraries, but it will likely push through regardless.
POD is coming, and the first company to nail it will re-write publishing.
To be fair, POD has been coming to rewrite publishing for the last twenty years or so. But I tend to agree, if I could go to a bookstore and walk out five minutes later with a decent printed copy of any book in existence at a reasonable price then I'd go there a lot more.
From what I can see, the actual story is that one bookseller has considered boycotting Amazon in response to one strong-selling Amazon book.
Headline makes it sound like this is an industry-wide trend, but then again, this is Slashdot...
while( ! article.isWorthwhile() ) { article.generalize(); } article.publish();
Speaking as an owner of a literary agency as well as a fellow with many thousands of physical books in my library, IMHO POD had its market potential nuked by the same forces that are impacting normal print. That is (a) the ability to carry an entire library in a Kindle, iP[od|ad|hone], general purpose Android device, other dedicated readers like the Nook, your home computer, laptop, etc; (b) the ability to put a title you want to read in your hands in seconds, (c) the ability to read what would have been a heavy volume on a relatively light device. Print (not POD) also suffers from (d) the eBook and POD ability to get a book from "last word written/edited" to the sales channel in what is effectively zero time.
Good POD devices are expensive; and demand, like demand for any physical book, is dropping as more and more people hop on the eBook bandwagon. This makes payback for the POD device an uncertain proposition for the host business.
The entire book business is in flux. One reason authors are interested (and understandably so) in Amazon's all-in-one model is the horrible royalty conditions the legacy publishers have imposed upon eBooks. With a normal book, the tradition is an advance, then royalties. With an eBook, the approach so far has almost always been give the publisher the book, they'll charge all costs to its account, and when it pays them off, they'll come with a (very small) royalty. There are several consequences to this, one of which is critical. For an established author who isn't top tier (meaning, can't demand an up front royalty), income from the previous traditionally published book fades away in the normal fashion as buzz for it dies down, but income for a new eBook via the same route won't even start for a year or more -- and in the meantime, the publishers still expect the author to do a great deal of the marketing out of pocket. That's a very tough situation to find yourself in, particularly if you are trying to make it as a full time writer.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
so my number 1 complaint about (new) bookstores is they never have what I am looking for, so now I have even less of a reason to go to them
have fun, your 200,000 square foot coffee shop really cant be doing that well
If it's not printed on paper, it's not a book, it's an eBook.
The single source that is causing this upheaval is the fact that the Banksters haven't been eliminated or arrested.
Bookstores are going out of business cause people don't have money to buy books. Like linux journal whining about ink, paper, and advertisers, they should raise the fucking price.
Mean while those Banksters are sucking the world dry. Not ONE brought to justice yet.
So we can continue down this road, of greed, lost jobs, and digital lockup of what used to be goods and services, or we can put all these fucking globalists in a prison.
in my state, books are taxed, magazines aren't
in my state, sugar soda is taxed, bread isn''t
you have to maintain a list of what is, and isn't taxed, in each zipcode...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I know bookstores have few customers these days, but I like them and need them. I like to relax in the bathtub with a good book. I prefer paper books over "ebooks", reading a webpage on the screen is fine, reading a whole book is not.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Sure, Amazon is thriving as the de facto marketplace that gets a cut of every sale.
But within that marketplace, independent stores of the sort that the big box bookstores were putting out of business now have a national marketplace that allows them to thrive where the big box bookstores have trouble keeping pace.
Personally I don't see physical books vanishing anytime soon.
They won't, just like 8-Tracks, Cassette Tapes, CDs, and MP3s have not killed off all Records and Small Record Stores.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
The point of POD is that you have your library of electronic books, but you want the Old School feel if holding a book - you print the one you need. You can certainly give the file to the POD operator in the store.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So if bookstores choose to boycott Amazon-published books, leaving Amazon to sell the books themselves like they do most other books, doesn't this make brick-and-mortar bookstores even less relevant?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Most of the analog world is being replaced by software and there is no need to whine about pies and the width of the slices.
Quite soon, books printed on paper will be luxury items. In time they will come with instructions how to use them.
Blackwell's in the UK are already on it. They've got an instore POD machine which prints any paperback they've got the file for, including Gutenberg stuff, in seven minutes or so, for the standard price of a paperback the same size. The thing they didn't expect, but which has been very popular, is the number of people self-publishing on it. For under £100 you can plug in a USB stick and get ten proper paperback copies of your own book, however good or bad. Colour cover and everything.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
I understand the point. The problem is, as I said, that the POD equipment is expensive, "real" books are dropping in popularity (regardless of how they are produced) and that generally speaking, the "feel" of a real book is more troublesome than the "feel" of an eBook. Personally -- and I readily admit this is just an opinion, but it *is* an opinion from someone who reads about a book a day -- real books seem to be to be more a matter of nostalgia than actual functionality; most of us reading today grew up with real books, and I think there is a hangover type of thing going on. In terms of actual benefits of a real book in the normal types of uses they undergo... there are very few.
There are potential "gotchas" for eBooks, but so far, they've been able to keep those experiences to a minimum, and as long as they do... eBooks will clobber real books.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Amazon.Com does NOT have a sales tax advantage in the eyes of the law. Yes they do not collect them, but individuals are still required by law to pay use tax on them unless the item is tax-free per state guidelines. So if the state is losing money, it is because Amazon's customers are committing tax fraud.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
When are people going to get over this, Amazon is NOT the only mail order place that does this. THEY ALL DO, it's the law.
Borders was FORCED OUT OF BUSINESS BY GREEDY INVESTORS. From the article http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Borders-seeks-approval-to-liquidate-1471467.php
So don't for an instant imply that Borders went out of business because of Amazon not paying state sales taxes. There are a lot of things to bash Amazon on, but obeying the law as far as collection of state sales taxes go shouldn't be one of them.
POD is not coming and if it ever does it will certainly not rewrite publishing. If someone ever wastes their time developing a decent POD implementation the best they'll achieve is a high rank in a sad magazine article entitled, "Top Ten 'Too Late' Technologies".
Digital readers are only going to improve in quality and drop in price. Right now there is zero reason for fiction to exist in a physical form except as a rapidly disappearing anachronism. As readers improve, technical and other large format books will soon join them. Just because there is currently still a market for physical books that doesn't mean it's a large sustainable one worth investing in.
Harvard University Bookstore has one.
The Harvard University Bookstore is run by Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, Inc. Of course, Barnes and Noble College Booksellers was a separate company from Barnes & Noble, Inc until 2009 (although Len Riggio. the chairman of Barnes & Noble, owned controlling interest and was chairman of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers as well).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I keep evangelizing to my friends and family about how happy I am with my Kindle and how I can carry entire libraries with me at any given time. However, most of the non-techie people I speak with seem to be attached to the idea of physical books. While, the trend is clearly going towards digital, I see a very real market continuing for dead-tree books and that may shrink, but it is clearly in no real danger of evaporating completely. POD is a novel idea and while I do not see it making any huge waves, I think there is clearly a niche for it. i wonder how they would go about enforcing copyright. Would the POD stations treat it like a copier, where there is a big warning not to print off a physical copy of a book you do not have the rights to or would they be influenced to actively police it? Would I be able to walk in there with torrented ebooks on my flash drive and walk out with unlicensed realistic-looking copies? That seems like a potential legal issue for sure.
One significant disadvantage of eBooks over dead tree books is the fleeting nature of them arising from the imposition of DRM.
I learned a lot from books I picked up from bookshelves in my home when I was a child just by browsing. There were classics which no one had read in twenty years, there were engineering text books that my father had kept (presumably he had opened some of them in the prior twenty years since he got his degree!), there were reference works -- a potpourri. I could pick up a book that was way over my head and that no one would ever have bought for me (or even thought to) even if it was 99 cents and just skim it and pick up a little something about some random topic. Two or three years later, I might run across the book again and skim or read it again and get much more from it. I recall reading Huck Finn at least three times before I was an adult and getting a completely different story each time (the first time it was an interesting tale, the second time it was making some very important points, and the third time it was a masterful work which showed how a point can be made without actually belaboring the point).
While it's true that some of the fiction works I'm talking about are now available on the internet due to them being so old, that's not true of newer works which are likely to be locked up virtually forever due to modern copyright law.
With DRMed eBooks, the odds of yourself or your kids being able to browse your collection in twenty years seems much lower than with hard copy books due to device changes, companies going out of business, changes in the law, etc.
Of course, eBooks can be great for that bestselling novel that probably will never become a classic and whose primary purpose is to keep you amused on a trip. If it had been a dead tree book, you would probably just leave in the airport when you finished with it so the DRM isn't a big deal and the advantages of eBooks probably far outweigh the disadvantages in this case.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I have a Kindle and I like having an e-reader.
I think digital is the way to go for hippie reasons, making it easier to move when I go to another apartment, and for dozens of other reasons.
Libraries are getting under-utilized now that so much reference information is online.
People who like reading typically LOVE coffee shops. (which is why Borders had Seattle's Best, Barnes and Noble has Star Bucks and Books-A-Million has Joe Mug)
WHY DO THEY HAVE TO BE DIFFERENT?
In the future (as in tomorrow) I would LOVE to build a multi-story Library/Coffee Shop/Bookstore. Have all the racks upon racks of print books upstairs (the actual library section), have the first floor full of sofas, overstuffed chairs, print magazines, shelves upon shelves of "take a book leave a book" racks (coffee shop near my place has one) for people to anonymously trade print books and magazines, have a movie viewing room, maybe a bike service section outside. It should appeal to hipsters and college students to no end, make people upset about the disappearing bookstores happy (especially if we keep retail physical media going), make the people who are upset about libraries disappearing happy, and it should be self financing through media sales and overpriced coffee.
Just thinking out loud here.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
You're right--people commenting about bookstores whining, blah blah blah are missing the point of the problem.
This isn't about electronic versus paper books. It's about a major distributor becoming the publisher at the same time.
Imagine if your favorite author started selling books that were only purchasable through one dominant store, and were only readable in that store's proprietary format, that you had to read on the device that store sold.
These details might be not all exactly correct, but that's the problem. It doesn't really matter if it's paper or electronic.
One nice thing about books is that they're essentially DRM-free, and allow competition for sellers. This Amazon thing sets up a dangerous precedent where books are locked into one seller.
It's really more about DRM than it is about brick n mortar versus webshops.
I still find myself using printed copies purely because I can *much* more easily flip between pages, and can organise the pages on the desk the way I like as I try to follow the argument (and a self printed copy is better than a bound copy here, because the binding restricts the layouts).
I use a ebook reader/printed copies rather than the screen to give my eyes a rest, and a change. The point is that a single format is not the best for every use, so I think the death of the printed book is overhyped and it will just become another media format (and probably a niche one). But books do have some major advantages over the other formats. They don't require any support technology to read, they are stable for a long time , are not as fragile as an ebook screen, and they are cheaper than an ebook reader. All of which may be important to your needs.
Novels, I prefer in ePub/Mobi formats since the reader I have is has a form factor which allows it to fit into a pocket better than the massmarket paperback format. And this is depsite having a screen approximately equal to the pages size, the ebooks thinner form factor work better given the way most pockets are constructed.
Master of Peng Shui.Ancient oriental art of Penguin Arranging)
ZIP codes aren't even enough. They're set up by the post office for its own convenience in routing mail; not by any municipality with taxation authority. I once lived in a ZIP code that encompassed one town, cut a swath out of another, and included bits of unincorporated land in two counties. Any one of those entities, as well as the state, could have set their own sales taxes, at different rates, on different items. Where I live now, there is a multi-county transportation agency that is authorized to (and does) charge a sales tax to help pay for commuter rail.
You can't even use the city field in your address; because, once again, the convenience of the post office comes into play. When I lived in the ZIP code I mentioned above, I lived in an unincorporated part of one county. But my mailing address listed the town in which the post office branch which delivered to my home was located, even though my home was outside the city limits.
Basically, you need to be able to pinpoint every single address to which a shipper could possibly deliver a package; and know what tax is charged on what items on that specific address. That really would be a holy hell of a huge and complex database. And said database could not remain static. Cities and counties like to change the tax rates and declare sales tax holidays (sometimes only on specific classes of goods) based on the shifting winds of politics.
Maybe... MAYBE... Amazon could handle the task. But you could kiss all of the smaller web-retail outlets goodbye. And I have doubts that even Amazon could build and maintain such a database.
Imagine all the people...
With Search Inside The Book (SITB), users can indeed "examine" the book they are aout to buy. The number of pages they can read is limited, though.
Manoj Srivastava Key C7261095 fingerprint = CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
>Books with good quality content and good production values will then become a thing of the past, because quality costs a lot to produce, readers can't examine the books before they've paid for it the way they can in a bricks 'n' mortar book store, and not enough people will exercise any legal right of return they may have to make a difference to the policy.
This is completely false. Customer reviews are superior to publisher gateways for determining quality and you can already download samples of every book on Amazon's Kindle to see if you'll like it or not.
I'm a techie, I own a Nook, I also still have an ever expanding room full of dead tree books. I don't see digital copies ever replacing my actual library. I admit, part of this is nostalgia, but there are also real, decent, reasons behind this. I'm not going to discount nostalgia, either, though, since casual reading is about enjoyment and not just technical matters of efficiency and cutting-edge-itude. I like sitting in my sunny room, on my comfortable leather chair, smoking my pipe with a decent glass of bourbon, reading actual books. There is something comforting in it. There also is something comforting in being able to walk into a room, and actual SEE books, to be able to walk past them, touch them, pull them off a shelf and physically examine them, and furthermore, quickly re-experience the pleasant memories of reading them. There also is something to having old books that you've carried around with you for decades, with its unique record of wear, it familiar heft and appearance. A good, loved, book is much like an old friend. I don't get that same feeling examining a flat list of titles and authors on my neat digital gadget.
Another reason I like physical books... I trust them. Being a technical, geeky, type, one thing I've learned is the transitory nature of digital things. Especially digital things tied into the whims and fortunes of a single device or entity. No one, barring a Fahrenheit 451 world, can take away, or spontaneously edit my physical books. The death of a single company, or server, or a simple policy change within a corporate behemoth, can't take a book away from me. In ten years I know my books will be sitting here still, but I'm not as sure about my insubstantial collection of small digital files (and oft included DRM).
I went to school for something hugely reading based, and academic (philosophy) field, so I have a large collection of strange, and utterly unpopular books sitting in my office. Being that these are niche titles (sadly), many of them will never turn into ebooks. There are still many, many, movies that have never made it to DVD, much less the newest, and greatest, trends. Will all format changes you run into the problem of popularity guiding conversion. The more obscure the title, and the small niche it may occupy, the less of a chance that some publisher will decide its worth it to convert to the newest trend. Further, my obscure titles don't lend themselves to linear reading, which is something that various ereaders completely fail at. Its hard to have 10-20 pages which you need to continually re-reference, plus constant flipping to indexes, figures, diagrams, and, heaven forbid, arbitrary points in completely different texts. Outside of casual fiction, I rarely read a book in the way that my ereader wants me too.
There also is the question of the second-hand market, and the joys of wandering through bookstores, flipping through random books at whim. I often discover whole new genres and authors this way. The ability to sit in a chair and read a chapter of two of a completely random book is one of the rare joys in life. Going to a book store is an experience, shopping on line is a focused, targeted, and purposeful activity. Its efficient, merely. Me and my girlfriend often set aside a whole day to go browse a large used bookstore, or go to one of the now defunct multi-story Borders in a ritzy shopping center. Often we even drag our friends and parents along. Its a fun summer outing. Hitting up Amazon's website for a quick, efficient, purposeful, transaction doesn't compete. These new or used books often cost less than than the ebook versions. Its amazing, I save money for buying something with actual materials and an actual supply chain.
That said, I love my Nook. I usually buy books for my Nook, and if I like them, I'll grab them for real. I end up wasting less space, in theory, with my large "too read" pile, and end up with less physical books taking up space. I generally only collect books by authors I truly enjoy now.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I sure hope you don't use Kindle for environmental reasons. If you do, you should do more research on what it takes to make a single unit.
Consider this article one bit of information for authors and buyers to consider when making a purchase.
The article may very well be identifying the first of many examples to come. It could very well be a bad conclusion, but at this point Amazon does have the power to take over e-publishing. Whether they do, or can in the near future, depends a lot on what people do and what publishers do and what authors do.
I sure hope you don't use Kindle for environmental reasons. If you do, you should do more research on what it takes to make a single unit.
Lets compare
Kindle with 500 books:
plastic, metal, electronics.
Weight is somewhere around a pound.
Volume less than a cubic foot.
500 Printed Books ...
Toxic chemicals in ink, whitening the paper, glue, binding material, colored ink for covers,
Weight around 500+ pounds
Volume 50 cubic feet
I hate to be the one to tell you that publishing books actually requires environmental resources. Paper manufacturing has historically been a very nasty process, with lots of dead fish, and actual burning rivers. A lot of the inks used are hazardous. Then you have the glue, thread, cloth, leather, foil, etc. used in the final product. After that, you also have the packaging (more materials), and shipping of the final products.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Then there's the fuel needed to get the books from wherever to my place, then there's the fuel needed to move my books when I move, not to mention the greater volume dwelling that would need to exist to house said books..... Having books that you keep as someone who actually moves occasionally consumes many resources, not the least of which is the organism moving said books (my back!!!).
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
As far as I know, it is illegal to compete unfairly, so why is this being handled via the media and not via the federal police?
Borders was killed by horrible management.
They wanted all the stores to be clones, right down to stock, never mind if certain types of books simply wouldn't sell in a given location. This meant that many locations ended up having to give shelf space over to things that simply would stay on the shelves until either sold ultra-cheap or returned, and doing so in favor of stocking more copies of things that would sell.
They chased off the employees who knew the stock. This is the main reason to go to a brick-and-mortar bookstore, in many cases--Amazon's recommendations are sometimes very strange, when you get down to it, and a live human is still better than it when you're trying to find a good reference book most times. Worse, this was in favor of ones who might as well been asking you if you wanted fries with that, and would forget to ring up items...but not forget to deactivate the security tags & bag them. (This doesn't inspire customers to go out of their way to mention surprise free items, either.)
They were just as friendly to authors, too, who would come into signings to find, if they were lucky, only a few copies of any of their books on the shelf--and get told to please not sign any books not being bought that day because they then can't be returned if not sold. The latter might be excusable if the policy is to basically have the signed-by-the-author copies be something you have to turn up on the day the author visits to get, but if you're doing it because you're worried the book won't sell in the first place when autographed copies are easier to sell...and there's really no excuse for not thinking ahead when you've arranged a signing and making sure there's copies of the book(s) to sign.
Bottom line? I stopped going to Borders well before I started using Amazon regularly.
A WHAT store? Is that like one of those coffee shops that sells DVDs, Magazines, CDs etc?
What if Amazon is able to undercut the Big Publishers by offering their books to the small stores as a cheaper price, which would then enable to the small store to charge their usual price and enhance their profit?
Would a small business truly be stupid enough to turn away prospective business, especially in this down economy?
If Amazon Books to make them a higher margin of profit, and they choose politics over business, then they deserve to go out of business.
Bearded Dragon
depends on how many you books you read over its lifespan. What is the breakeven point on number of books not printed to make a Kindle environmentally friendly. Of course this isn't counting any heavy metal pollution or nastyness like that in the manufacture of solid state electronics.
I'm not suggesting that paper isn't a nasty, wasteful process that is dangerous to the environment, nor am I in any way ignorant of the impact of the publishing industry and the paper and pulp industry.
However I am suggesting that if you did some research into the environmental impact of electronics manufacturing and disposal you'd discover that it is an equally nasty and wasteful process. And it is this that I believe you are ignorant of.
Examples being the production of integrated circuits, semiconductors, printed circuit boards, and printed wiring assemblies. All release hazardous gases, effluents, use up amazing amounts of water and energy for an item several hundred times their size and use a large number of hazardous chemicals.
This does not even consider the environmental cost of getting the raw materials used in electronics out of the ground and processed even before they go into the manufacturing process.
I'm not even asking you to care, just to be aware.
I'm not suggesting that paper isn't a nasty, wasteful process that is dangerous to the environment, nor am I in any way ignorant of the impact of the publishing industry and the paper and pulp industry.
However I am suggesting that if you did some research into the environmental impact of electronics manufacturing and disposal you'd discover that it is an equally nasty and wasteful process. And it is this that I believe you are ignorant of.
Examples being the production of integrated circuits, semiconductors, printed circuit boards, and printed wiring assemblies. All release hazardous gases, effluents, use up amazing amounts of water and energy for an item several hundred times their size and use a large number of hazardous chemicals.
This does not even consider the environmental cost of getting the raw materials used in electronics out of the ground and processed even before they go into the manufacturing process.
I'm not even asking you to care, just to be aware.
Hahaha... so bookstores are now banning books. Fantastic. Evolve or die. the future = Amazon-bookstore kiosks. "Excuse me? Do you need help finding something to download to your iPad? A Latte?"
Just because we don't see Amazon on the high street it appears as our online friend, making life easy, delivering just about anything to your door. Why is that? Why do we hate Tesco and have no opinion about Amazon? Here is a company that is polluting the globe by shipping products down every avenue while at the same time helping to shut local stores! Amazon is actually worse than Tesco. The happy smiles message masks the fact it is choking the high street and polluting the planet. Boycott!!!
On the ebook issue - I have one but have realised that, as an academic, I develop a 'cloud' memory when I read electronic copy - I don't commit the detail to memory I rely on electronic storage... then forget about it.