Author Charles Stross: Is Amazon a Malignant Monopoly, Or Just Plain Evil?

An anonymous reader writes "Sci-fi author Charles Stross has a post providing insight into Amazon's recent bullying tactics against a major book publishing group. He puts the fight into perspective for the two most important parts of the book market: author and reader. He says: 'Amazon's strategy (as I noted in 2012) is to squat on the distribution channel, artificially subsidize the price of ebooks ("dumping" or predatory pricing) to get consumers hooked, rely on DRM on the walled garden of the Kindle store to lock consumers onto their platform, and then to use their monopsony buying power to grab the publishers' share of the profits. If you're a consumer, in the short term this is good news: it means you get cheap books. But if you're a reader, you probably like to read new books. By driving down the unit revenue, Amazon makes it really hard for publishers—who are a proxy for authors—to turn a profit. Eventually they go out of business, leaving just Amazon as a monopoly distribution channel retailing the output of an atomized cloud of highly vulnerable self-employed piece-workers like myself. At which point the screws can be tightened indefinitely. And after a while, there will be no more Charlie Stross novels because I will be unable to earn a living and will have to go find a paying job. TL:DR; Amazon's strategy against Hachette is that of a bullying combine the size of WalMart leaning on a much smaller supplier. And the smaller supplier in turn relies on really small suppliers like me. It's anti-author, and in the long term it will deprive you of the books you want to read.'"

Comments

Mestatacized business. Nothing but growth.

[Anonymous Coward]

The cancer analogies are VERY apt.

Read his books

[PReDiToR]

Go to the store and buy them! They're ace! And you can give them to your friends afterwards.

I downloaded a crapload of them, he's really good.

Am I making it harder or easier for him to make a living?

Re:Read his books

[0123456]

Protip: There is no good guy here.

Yes. Ideally writers would eliminate publishers and Amazon, and sell direct to their readers. But that's hard to do when most readers want a central location where they can find new books to buy.

The funny part is that the publishers could have created that location with their own online store years ago, but, instead, they let Amazon do it.

Re:Read his books

[Anonymous Coward]

Publishers don't just put the ink to the paper, they also do other things like edit the books. As a slashdot reader, you're probably unfamiliar with what editors actually do, so the confusion is understandable.

Re:Read his books

[dgatwood]

A good editor is like having a glass of a fine wine, evening out the rough edges. A bad editor is like drinking too much and having a big hangover the next day.

The key to good editing is pointing out errors while retaining the author's voice. Unfortunately, lots of editors go way too far and think that they need to rewrite everything the way he or she would have written it. This tends to result in misery all around.

Re:Read his books

[Phrogman]

In essence, Amazon is letting the authors write the books, the publishers and writers edit the books, and the publishers produce the books as well as promote them, then sidling in as the cheapest distributor with the greatest access to the customer and ensuring the prices are so low that no one makes a real profit except Amazon.

I don't buy from Amazon, I would if I had no other access to the book I need, but by and large I get my books from physical bookstores. I *like* authors I read and I want to see them continue to write.

Re:Read his books

[phantomfive]

Publishers don't just put the ink to the paper, they also do other things like edit the books.

There is already a market growing for this service, where the author can hire someone to edit her/her book.

Re:Read his books

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny, I know a number of editors. They all think authors actually aren't well-placed to judge their own books, and tell me a good edit improves them immensely.

And frankly, I agree.

Re:Read his books

[NicBenjamin]

By driving down the unit revenue, Amazon makes it really hard for publishers—who are a proxy for authors—to turn a profit.

Publishers a proxy for authors? As if their interests were the same or something?
He just wants to conflate them so we sympathize with the poor downtrodden corporations.
Protip: There is no good guy here.

And why would he want us to sympathize with the poor downtrodden corporations if he didn't think that the interests of said corporation were a proxy for the interests of authors?

And the reason he thinks that way is that when he has an idea that sounds really good in his head, but is actually stupid, the person who gently lets him down is his editor. The people who help him do all the things he can't to sell his books are at his publisher. And without that publisher he makes virtually no money, because he's not JK fucking Rowling and he doesn't have millions of fans who will buy his next book even if it's hard to find. He sent them a manuscript, they liked it, and now they do marketing so he can focus on his work. His publisher is his friend.

It's much different from the music industry. A musician typically collaborates with other musicians in the band, so his dumb ideas all get vetoed by the drummer. They make money by live shows at which fans give it to them directly. They clearly know marketing, distribution, etc. themselves already because you don;t get discovered if you can;t become a major act in your region. It's extremely common that the suits at the label will show up, tell them some totally stupid plan that obviously won't work, condescend to all their objections, and it's far from unknown for said suits to try to bully the prettiest girl in the group into sexual favors.

I'm somewhat neutral in this dispute, but I tend to lean towards Hachette for the simple reason that I can understand how I'd find good books from new authors with minimal work if Amazon died, but i can't understand how I'd pull that shit off if publishers like Baen disappeared.

Re:Read his books

[DocHoncho]

The Internet is the very definition of decentralized. Sure, Google might provide an easy way to search for what you want, but then you're directed to some half-assed eCommerce site which may, or may not, be trustworthy. Assuming they're legit, or you just don't care, you've got to navigate whatever checkout process they've got, fill out a bunch of forms with personal info, and if you're lucky they don't steal your identity.

Don't get me wrong, what Amazon is doing here is despicable. But let's not kid ourselves, Amazon got to be the size it is because people like being able to just find what they're looking for and buy it with minimal fuss and without navigating the god-awful clusterfuck that is eCommerce. The comparison to Wal-Mart is particularly apt. Not only because of the two companies desire to take over the world, but because Wal-Mart, like Amazon, has excelled in giving people what they want, when they want it, and at a lower price than any competitor. The fact that these kind of retailers are destroying local economies is the last thing on most peoples minds.

Re:Read his books

[rtb61]

You obviously have no idea at all who Amazon are. They are a logistics company, a store and pick distribution company. They have an online retail presence retail via a web site but their core is to take product from manufactures store it at Amazons warehouses and the pick product as directed by retail sales and distribute it.

Their ultimate goal is to cut out all middlemen between producers and consumers at take all that profit between the two for themselves.

They don't actively promote that because of course other logistics companies might wake up to the threat Amazon is, deny the delivery services and start setting up their own retail web sites to directly sell product and fill that whole logistics gap between producer and consumer, especially when they already have a solid foundation of warehousing and deliveries. Of course that means sticking it to the current bunch of wholesalers and retailers.

It really does make sense for companies like FedEx, UPS, TNT to step up and add that retail web site to feed their logistic services (warehousing, picking, delivery) and directly compete with Amazon before Amazon pushes to global direct deliveries via internal transport services, it is inevitable and just a matter of time.

Reality is lame little book publishers are pretty much nothing in Amazons global vision, just something you step on along the way, no loss to anyone but the useless publishers themselves.

Re:Read his books

[david_thornley]

Thing is, Amazon has been destroying the older book markets, where the publishers used to make a larger profit, and so they become dependent on a market that they don't profit much from. You can accuse the publishers (except Barnes & Noble) of not keeping up with the digital age, but in practice having a single dominant player in the market is almost always bad. And, while you're not locked into Amazon, it's a lot easier to buy from them than to buy anywhere else. Most book purchases for Kindles are going to be from Amazon.

Publishing houses still offer some very useful services. They will edit books. They will have people looking over them to see if there's anything the author is likely to be sued over. They can organize marketing campaigns to make people aware of books. In order to do this, they need to have enough revenue.

If Amazon has, and retains, a stranglehold on book distribution, several things will happen that I don't like. Authors will find it harder to make a living writing, and so fewer will be writing books for my enjoyment. New books will be badly edited. I'm perfectly happy to pay authors and editors for books I like, but I won't be able to get what I want.

Do we really need new books?

[CRCulver]

The title of this comment may be provocative, but after buying a Kindle Paperwhite, something that Amazon does really well (and just keep it in airplane mode all the time so you don't have to deal with Amazon's ecosystem), I have found myself with such a huge choice of classic literature titles from either Project Gutenberg or pirate ebook sites, that I feel I'll never catch up with all the old stuff, let alone hunger after anything new. For Mr. Stross, I'm sorry, but you're competing with the past, and there are a myriad of science-fiction writers like yourself that already have more books out there than anyone can read.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Stross's novels are an extrapolation of contemporary science and culture into various futures. As a geek, you should be able to recognize the beginnings of Stross's fantasies--crypto currencies, IT culture, malware, MMORPGs, maker culture, -- and laugh as these trends are taken to their logical conclusion in the various universes he has devised.

Now, I seek out and read hard SF. The trouble with classic works of this subgenre, (the vast bulk of which is still under copyright protection) is that it becomes obsolete. For instance, take the Bussard Ramjet-- a relativistic spaceship that was (at least for the time)theoretically possible without breaking physical laws. The Bussard Ramjet enabled a host of authors, most notably Poul Anderson, to write stories about Relativistic Time (twin paradoxes, and the like) But IIRC, the fuel density in the interstellar medium is insufficient for the Bussard scheme to work. So all those stories suffer from a patina of obsolescence.

To avoid this, it's necessary to acquaint yourself with the writers of the here and now. Stross is one such writer.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[ArcadeMan]

I don't read much, except technical documents, so I'll move the argument to movies. I know the list of movies is much shorter than books, older special effects didn't age too well, etc. But nonetheless...

I'm in my 40's, so I can appreciate movies from the 1970's and up, but about once or twice a month I like to browse in the "Movie Trailers" channel of my Apple TV to see what's new. And I always find at least half a dozen titles that I'd like to see, but for that half dozen list there's all the rest that really doesn't interest me at all.

The same thing can be applied to videogames.

My point is, however huge the library is, there's some things you'll never want to read, listen, watch or play. I'll pull numbers from thin air and say that every person probably needs 100 authors to get one title he/she wants.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're essentially saying that anyone interested in publishing shouldn't, because there's "enough books already"? Does someone SERIOUSLY have to point out what's wrong with this line of thinking?

Re:Do we really need new books?

[dreamchaser]

I can't believe this was modded up. Just because there are plenty of good old titles doesn't mean one shouldn't read new titles. Following your logic nobody should bother writing at all. Let's just give it all up.

Talk about drivel. Your post has it in spades.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[cheesybagel]

You know what dude? For every well known author like this there are a metric fuckton of authors that get more profit using Amazon's model. Guess what Amazon has competition too and nothing forbids you of using a different venue. You can even sell the books for yourself. So please excuse me ignoring this arsehole.

Amazon does a lot of bad things but trying to sell ebooks cheaper than paper books isn't one of those things.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[Frosty Piss]

CR, you've turned this into a "paper vs ebook" argument, but I think you miss Strosss point: Amazon's monopolistic stranglehold on distribution forces the price down which puts publishers out of business. This results in Amazon being the dominant publisher, working directly with authors. But it also allows Amazon to dictate to authors what they will pay, just as they did with the traditional publishers. This is not "free market", it is a monopoly no less than Microsoft was, and it's not good for consumer choice.

Second point: It may not seem like it here at Slashdot, but the desire to have and to hold and to read "real" books is not dead. Certain segments of the current generation might feel that way, but I don't see it. The bookstores in my town are always busy, the library in my town is always busy, and many of the books (of the so-called "dead tree" variety) are often on hold by several library patrons before I get to check them out. I suppose you're going to say "What a quaint idea! To check out a book!", but many people still enjoy the experience of turning pages...

I know I'm probably the minority, but when I buy a technical book in electronic form, I immediately print it out and put it in a three-ring binder, much easier to locate what I'm interested and flip back and forth between sections... And here's the high-tech sacrilege: I print them out single-sided with wide margins. I use the blank side for notes...

Now get off my lawn.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[cheesybagel]

He is not that good of a writer. He is ok but he is no Frank Herbert or even William Gibson.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[CRCulver]

When writing is done to produce a product for mass consumption, the quality of literature goes down.

While some fine modernist literature has come from people who were not targeting a mass audience and were able to depend on patronage or another line of work while writing, the English canon clearly offers abundant counter-evidence for the idea that mass-market writing results in lower quality. Shakespeare was knocking out plays at a fairly rapid pace for the plebian theatre-goers at the Globe, while Dickens was writing his novels in installments published in the ordinary magazines of his day. Mark Twain wrote for a general American public and enjoyed making a mint off it.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[Zalbik]

Amazon's monopolistic stranglehold on distribution forces the price down which puts publishers out of business. This results in Amazon being the dominant publisher, working directly with authors. But it also allows Amazon to dictate to authors what they will pay, just as they did with the traditional publishers. This is not "free market", it is a monopoly no less than Microsoft was, and it's not good for consumer choice.

There significant problems with this comparison:

1) There is almost no barrier to entry to becoming an author. There is a huge barrier to entry to building an operating system.
2) Microsoft's evil was not in existing as a monopoly, it was in abusing that monopoly (operating systems) to gain control over new markets (browsers/internet). There are regulations which monopolies must follow. Microsoft didn't.
3) Amazon is not a monopoly. See Apple / Google Books.
4) "But it also allows Amazon to dictate to authors what they will pay". Suppliers cannot dictate prices. Producers and consumers dictate prices. If books are too cheap, nobody will write them. If books are too expensive, nobody will buy them. Amazon is trying to find the sweet spot that is the lowest price at which people will still write books people are willing to read. I don't find that malignant or evil.

when I buy a technical book in electronic form, I immediately print it out and put it in a three-ring binder, much easier to locate what I'm interested and flip back and forth between sections.... I print them out single-sided with wide margins.

Ha! I scribe mine onto the skins of dead panda bears. In Dodo bird blood! Take that, environment!

Re:Do we really need new books?

[0123456]

You mean Iain Banks.

In his later books, I'd say even Iain Banks is no Iain Banks.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[0123456]

If every single author tried the self distribution model, the signal to noise ratio with Hogwarts fan Fiction and Tolkien ripoffs would drown everything out.

If every single movie-maker could upload their movies to Youtube, the signal to noise ratio with home cat videos would drown everything out.

If every single person could create their own web pages, the signal to noise ration with cat pictures would drown everything out.

See how dumb that sounds?

Re:Do we really need new books?

[mrmeval]

A friend of mine self publishes on Amazon. He managed to bootstrap himself to be his own publisher by doing the best he could on his first two books. He's now to the point he pays the people needed to review and clean up his books as a publisher would do. He self promotes and is doing well enough he's happy. If he had the time he'd be able to do writing full time but sadly he started writing science fiction in his 60s. The one thing he cannot do and probably will not is to provide intriquing cover art.

Stross and other authors dependant on an outdated business model and unable to change will continue to go on ranting screeds against change.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[HiThere]

When you say "Youtube" you introduce a centralized locus of control.

So far no search engine is able to select works on a topic with good editing, much less a decent plot structure. I think they're closer to being able to select by stylistic markers.

So, no, I don't see it as sounding silly. I see you as presenting cardboard arguments.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[funwithBSD]

and it is already there. Check out B.V Larson, Jack Campbell, and Charles Nuttall. I am sure there are more, but those three I happen to like.

These guys crank out 2nd and 3rd rate Sci-Fi at an alarming rate.
It is nothing as good as many of the authors mentioned here, but on the other hand, it is a $.99 to $3.99 guilty pleasure while I wait for the once-every-few-years pace of 1st tier writers.

  I mean, it is popcorn stuff, but at least I don't feel ripped off like I did by Brian Herbert $8.99 a pop, at least $7 Frank Herbert premium, and $.99 of fan fiction.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[Bill Dog]

The secret's in the common denominator of those.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[guises]

I fail to see the advantage between your friend's relationship with Amazon and Stross's publisher. Amazon seems to just be acting as a really crappy publisher for your friend - offering no editing, no promotion, just taking a cut of the money because they're the gatekeeper and they can. You can call Stross's model "outdated," but I can certainly see why he'd try to defend it.

"But we've already had this conversation for music. Didn't we collectively decide that getting away from traditional publishing models was progress?" - Apple doesn't have a monopoly on music distribution (anymore). iPods play DRM-free mp3s. There's a big difference there. If your friend could self-publish on multiple platforms, so it was your friend controlling distribution and controlling (via competition) how much of a cut the distributors could take and how much influence they had, this would be a very different situation.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[blue trane]

The best solution is a basic income. Free writers to write because that's what they want to do, not because they have to for a living.

Re:Do we really need new books?

[blue trane]

Can the search engine select reviews with those keywords?

Re:Do we really need new books?

[pepty]

Your model is going out of business, Charles, figure it out.

Hell, you wrote Accelerando, maybe you should re-read it so you can remember the lessons of your own book.

Or maybe you could read the article:

Forbes seem to think that Hachette is a producer and Amazon is a distributor. This isn't quite true. I am a producer. From my perspective, Hachette is a value-added wholesale distributor: they supply editorial, production, packaging, marketing, accounting, and sales services and pay me a percentage of the revenue. (I could do this myself, and self-publish, but I don't want to be a publisher, I want to be a writer: we have this thing called "the division of labour", and it suits me quite well to out-source that side of the job

I've actually got much of the equipment and contacts I need ready just in case I need to start self-publishing. I decline to go there right now because it's expensive in startup costs (think in terms of paying editors to work by the hour) and will require a lot of work, and I hate accounting, and there's a lot of it involved (think: separate business bank accounts, incorporation, quarterly VAT accounting) ... but I keep it open as an option. Thing is, I reckon being my own publisher would take up half the time I would otherwise spend writing. It'd cut my written output by about 30%, in other words.

Pretty stupid reasoning

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Yes, Amazon wants no more publishers to get a cut, just them and the author. And yes, they will want to lower the author's incentive to the minimum necessary for them to write., But not lower than that.

The publisher's aren't just representing the author. They are middle men.

Amazon will simply replace them with one vertically integrated company.

Worse for authors, maybe, but it owuld be beyond stupid for them to make it worse than the alternative.

Re:Pretty stupid reasoning

[CRCulver]

While publishers are middlemen, at least they are at least some level of quality control. As an Amazon top reviewer, I get several times a week solicitations to review a book self-published through Amazon, and the vast majority of these are appallingly bad -- mispellings and grammatical errors abound, the typesetting is goofy, and in terms of style these authors could not write themselves out of a paper bag. An established publisher would reject the majority of these, saving consumers the time spent finding out that they are dreck, and for the small minority of authors with fledgling talent, there would be an editor who could propose changes for the better.

Furthermore, the publishers also provide some level of advertising. Often the books I am asked to review are hyped through a marketing agency that the author had to hire at his own expense, and considering how unreadable some of these books are, I highly doubt the authors will make enough money back to compensate for what they paid on marketing. For the vast majority of authors, the new economy is just money down the drain with nothing to show for it compared to the old model.

Re:Pretty stupid reasoning

[jonsmirl]

I have to agree with this, the need for a publisher is disappearing just like the need for a recording label. Stross should self publish and then cut a direct deal with Amazon. He'd probably end up with more money that way.

Since he's a well know author, maybe try putting his self-published books up on Indiegogo first. He might net enough off from doing that for each book that the later revenue from Amazon is just gravy.

Re:Pretty stupid reasoning

[CRCulver]

The problem is that -- as I already pointed out in another comment here -- most self-published authors are not prepared to spend their scanty resources on editing services. The sort of self-published books I often get asked to review are written by working-class dreamers who think they can make it big, and the tiny amount of money they have to invest upfront goes straight to marketing.

You also think proofreading is cheap. While I mainly work as a translator, I occasionally accept proofreading work, and I know that in my market (Finland) I could easily charge 8–10&euro per standard page, so a 200-page novel could easily reach 2000€. And that's just proofreading! Editing would cost much more. There's enough opportunities out there that I don't feel any pressure to lower the price, so a self-published author asking me to translate his book for $250 would just get laughed at.

Re:Pretty stupid reasoning

[Crispy Critters]

People who are not involved in the publishing industry think it would be great for authors to self publish. Interestingly, authors seem to think almost uniformly that it is a terrible idea. The authors, who have a very good idea just what publishers can add to the book, mostly really really like what publishers do for them.

The authors also don't think that they will make more money by self publishing either, because they know how much less they will be writing because of the time spent on other tasks currently handled by the publisher.

Re:Pretty stupid reasoning

[tlhIngan]

While publishers are middlemen, at least they are at least some level of quality control. As an Amazon top reviewer, I get several times a week solicitations to review a book self-published through Amazon, and the vast majority of these are appallingly bad -- mispellings and grammatical errors abound, the typesetting is goofy, and in terms of style these authors could not write themselves out of a paper bag. An established publisher would reject the majority of these, saving consumers the time spent finding out that they are dreck, and for the small minority of authors with fledgling talent, there would be an editor who could propose changes for the better.

Publishers do a lot, actually. All the author has to do is dump the publisher a block of text. That's it.

The publisher's job is to wrangle up an editor to punch that text into something readable (while trying to maintain the author's vision), then wrangle a typesetter to put that text into blocks - properly formatted chapters, section headings, images with captions (and the odd forgotten image that needs to be retrieved).

Then there are the extra matter - table of contents, indices, "about the author" bios and other matter that gets added (copyrights, ISBNs, etc). And then cover art needs to be produced by an artist. And try to catch things like low-resolution images that haven't been replaced which come out as pixelated crap in the final output.

All that is then taken and the book is typeset - laying the tables and text in the proper styles and everything. Even ebooks are typeset to ensure that the text generally flows correctly, images line up, etc.

Publishers do a lot. Self-publishers have to do the rest, but in general, an author is responsible for just producing the text, the publisher does everything to beat that text into something readable and wrapping it up as necessary.

And authors can produce some strange text - some use plain old ASCII and do oddball markups, Others just bold/italic/change font sizes (it's the editor's job to figure out if that's a chapter break for the typesetter to properly format), etc.

Printing is such a small part of books that most of the cost is everything else, hence why most ebooks actually aren't that much cheaper in the end - all that work still exists on the ebook as well - you just save on the printing/warehousing/shipping which at most is 10%.

Re:Pretty stupid reasoning

[Daemonik]

I'd challenge your perceptions there, because most self published ebooks on Amazon sell for 1/10th the cost of a publisher produced eBook. Yet there is a hungry market for books that they are serving, regardless of their warts and grammatical errors. Publishers, as they currently do business, are standing in the way of that market, in fact blatantly ignoring it for their own higher profit "established" authors.

Alternative Summary

[ustolemyname]

The author's intentions could be summarized as, "Does this false dichotomy make me look smart?"

Hachette Group isn't a tiny publisher...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hachette has been around for quite some time. Their entry to the US market was by way of buying Time Warner books. They've bought Hyperion books too.

So it's probably not a struggle between the big mean web store and the innocent niche publisher. I don't think either of them are even slightly concerned with your interests.

Analogy cut short?

[CurryCamel]

Should not the analogy continue a bit further with:
and when there are no more Charlie Stross novels, the customers can not buy them, making Amazon's incomes diminish. At which time they have to pay more to the Charlie Strosses out there.

Is this not just precise how capitalism is supposed to work?

Re:Analogy cut short?

[vux984]

Is this not just precise how capitalism is supposed to work?

Actually no. Not even close. This is how its supposed to work: the Charlie Strosses would just sell through different channels. The customers would buy through the other channels. Amazon would miss the income, and would pay what it took to get the novels (and customers) back.

But that requires a competitive marketplace with multiple competing channels. If amazon owns enough of the market, then the Charlie Strosses can't stay solvent just selling through other channels. This gives amazon more power to DICTATE pricing than a functioning market would normally allow.

Publishers are Dinosaurs.

[brunes69]

Publishers are not "proxys for authors". They are another obsolete industry group fighting the inevitable for their survival, no different than the RIAA.

Assume there is a world where I as an author can contract with a third party for proofreading and editing at a fixed cost, and then "self publish" to Amazon and other eBook providers, without a man in the middle publisher eating up my profits, I can sell the books far cheaper and interact directly with my audience. Many authors are flocking to self-publish nowadays and the number is just going to keep growing.

Re:Publishers are Dinosaurs.

[Crispy Critters]

Many authors would rather write than worry about finding and paying for editing, proof reading, cover art, advertising, promotional travel, etc. They are capable of it, but would rather spend their time doing what they do best, which is write. Also, they would rather work under contract with some guaranteed income rather than shoulder all the risk themselves.

Re:Publishers are Dinosaurs.

[Anubis IV]

You're right that they are not proxies, and you're also right that they are obsolete. Even so, not all of the services they provide are obsolete.

For instance, you cite editing, which is indeed one valuable service that they provide. In addition to editing, I'd also add filtering, marketing, and employing authors. The fact is, 99% of self-published stuff is utter and complete crap, a marginal step up from the entry-level stuff you'd find on a fanfiction site. Publishers perform a valuable service when they pick out the 1% that isn't crap, pay the author an advance or for rights to publish their work, polish their work until it shines, and then market the hell out of it so that the money getting spent in the market ends up going to the best works.

Without someone calling attention to the grade-A stuff that deserves our notice, it doesn't get nearly the reward that it deserves. Sure, the good stuff will likely bubble up to the top of the sales charts, allowing the people who check the lists every day to grab them and enjoy them, but there's a big difference between a generic #1 in the bestseller list that only the avid readers are paying attention to, and something so popular that it can spill out and affect an entire generation (e.g. the Harry Potters, Lord of the Rings, Catcher in the Ryes, Watership Downs, Great Gatsbys, To Kill a Mockingbirds, etc.).

It oftentimes takes a large up-front investment to make those sorts of things happen, and without an entity willing to take those risks while being deep-pocketed enough to be able to absorb the losses, it'll be rough for the people who could be the greatest authors of the next generation to ever break into the business. Moreover, those advances that the publishers pay out help to keep the authors employed as authors, rather than having to split their time just to put bread on the table. We can't and shouldn't underestimate the value that that service provides to the industry as a whole.

So while the publishers are indeed obsolete and holding onto practices that they should have given up, it seems to me that far too many people are all too willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Authors can't contract out for a third-party to handle all of these services without that third-party being, in essence, a publisher.

or, they're just a business

[argStyopa]

Any organism will try to dominate its environment.
Corporations are the same; they will work to optimize the merger for themselves. Then either they will dominate, or someone will come along and outcompete them, and they adapt or die.

Let's remember that publishers Mr Stross is bemoaning have themselves acted as plutocratic gatekeepers to the public reading markets for a century or more themselves.

Amazon's just doing it better now.

I'm sorry if an author feels he can no longer make a living being a writer, but he isn't entitled to that occupation. He can either keep doing it because he loves it, it he can, as he said, get a real job. Sorry if capitalism is painful that way.

There's a gaping hole in his theory

[Rix]

Amazon isn't forcing DRM on the publishers. They would be quite happy to let them sell ebooks without it.

That and the publishers "share" of profits is exactly zero. Anything above that is a market inefficiency.

Amazon does not rely on DRM

[0123456]

Publishers demanded that Amazon use DRM... and now whine that readers are locked in to Kindle because that DRM prevents them from moving those books to a different ebook reader.

Any publisher who wants to can upload DRM-free ebooks to Amazon.

Re:Amazon does not rely on DRM

[0123456]

And yet somehow even books from Baen and Tor (who don't DRM their books) end up on Amazon indistinguishable from those from other publishers.

Maybe they should stop enabling DRM on their Kindle books, then.

When you upload a Kindle book to Amazon, there's a checkbox to enable DRM. Just don't check it. Job done.

Re:Amazon is short-sighted

[0123456]

Squeezing your suppliers' profit margins is never a good long-term strategy.

Publishers aren't Amazon's suppliers: writers are. Publishers are just middle-men who get in the way.

And, oddly enough, those writers only get about 15% royalties if their ebooks are sold through a Big Five publisher, whereas they get 70% if they sell direct through Amazon.

Maybe you're telling the wrong organization to give everyone a fair share of the profits.

Re:Or, you could...

[Slick_W1lly]

This.

I started boycotting Amazon after the (admittedly *very long time ago*) change in their policies from 'We will never sell your information!!!' to 'We'll give it who we damn please' and refused to 'delete' my account. This was in the late 90's...

I take some consolation in the failed pairing of Amazon and Borders, and hope to see the same for Amazon within the next decade.
Simply don't buy from them. Or distribute through them. The two combined would eventually mean they atrophy into nothing.

I'm doing my part!

DRM or no DRM, pick one

[Solandri]

rely on DRM on the walled garden of the Kindle store to lock consumers onto their platform

It's a bit duplicitous to criticize Amazon for using DRM, when the primary reason you wish to sell your book on Amazon is to take advantage of their DRM for your ebook. Non-DRMed books from any source can be converted to work on the Kindles just fine. Set up your own website, sell ebooks there, and retain 100% of the profit. Yeah a lot of people shop on Amazon, but they search with Google, BIng, and Yahoo. If your website is the primary source for your ebooks, it's almost guaranteed to rank in the top 3 search results and people will find it.

Oh, but you want DRM on your ebooks when people read them on a Kindle? Well, just as you have the right to use DRM to restrict what readers do with your ebooks, Amazon has the right to use DRM to restrict how authors sell their books if they want to be readable on a Kindle. Sorry, them's the breaks. Live by DRM, die by DRM. Don't expect me to shed a tear because someone is arbitrarily restricting your options, when that's exactly what you're doing to me.

Re:DRM or no DRM, pick one

[volsung]

Interestingly, Scalzi's latest publication calls out that it is DRM free in the book description: http://www.amazon.com/Unlocked...

Re:Amazon is short-sighted

[0123456]

It's 70% only if Amazon has exclusive rights

No, it's not.

Anyone selling ebooks for between $2.99 and $9.99 in a country where Amazon has an online store gets 70% royalties.

Re:Mestatacized business. Nothing but growth.

[Mister Liberty]

Metastasized.
Fixed that for 'ya.

Other than that -- Amazon, they sell MTB tires, I discovered today,
by way of a Google link.
Still trying to figure out why that gave me an uneasy feeling.

I may in fact concur.

Evil?

[edibobb]

Take a look at Amazon's patent history. First, they kill Barnes and Noble with one of the most obvious and trivial patents ever issued, the infamous 1-click patent, and now they've patented a photo on a white background. Very nice. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...

Re:Amazon is short-sighted

[Richard_at_work]

And out of that 70%, the writer now has to supply their own editors, artwork, proof readers and layout specialists. And yes, it does indeed show when many of those professions have been involved and when they haven't (I read several major published authors such as Neal Asher, Peter F Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds et al, but also read a heck of a lot of the free or cheap stuff from the Kindle store - there can be a huge difference in quality even when you aren't talking about overall story lines etc).

Refuse DRM

[kasper_souren]

Cory Doctorow is quite successful and he's thus far refused to jump on the DRM band wagon. On the contrary, all his books are available under a Creative Commons license, and I think part of his success is due to this. Personally I'm much more likely to support an author who believes in freedom of information and I have happily bought some of his books to give away to friends, a while after I had read freely available versions on some electronic device.

Re:Why don't the authors

[jader3rd]

create their own distribution websites?

In the days before iTunes that's what we had. You could browse for different stores in Windows Media Player, and pick from a variety of distributors. You could always go to different websites to find songs and books. But only the really dedicated did this. Then iTunes and the iPod came out with one place to purchase content. The existing market didn't like it because it limited choices, but it spread like wildfire to the majority of the population; finally they didn't need to make decisions on where to get content from, there was only one place to get it from. The same is happening with websites, if an app doesn't exist in Apples app store, then the company doesn't exist to most people. Browsers are feeling too nerdy, and technical for most people, and they prefer their appliance like apps.
So the reasons why authors don't create their own distribution channels is that the majority of the population doesn't think outside of the box.

Sorry Charlie

[Giant Electronic Bra]

He's full of it. Charles Stross is an excellent writer, whom I will seek out and read. If he's not on Kindle/Amazon at some reasonable price THEN I WON'T BUY FROM AMAZON. Its just like you say here with buying a paperback, I will buy an iPad or whatever the heck it takes to get Charlie's books.

The TRUE analogy here would be ESPN and Comcast. Every so often ESPN TELLS COMCAST how much they're paying for their channel, AND COMCAST PAYS IT. So, Charles, this is what you do, you tell Amazon what you ARE GOING TO GET for a royalty, and they will pass it on to me, or someone else will. Its just that simple.

Honestly, I don't see how Amazon has more or less leverage than any other publisher has ever had. Publisher's have a good bit of weight in the market and they pretty well dictate what up-and-coming authors are going to get (and hint, it was always crap in case you forgot Chuck). However when you're Charles Stross or Steven King, etc then you pretty much have the shoe on your foot and do the kickin'. Just like Ace is going to suck it up and pay a nice advance and a good royalty or else you'll go to Tor, so Amazon will to or else you'll go to Apple.

As time goes on this becomes less and less of a problem as well because eReaders are now pretty much a generic hardware commodity and little private walled-gardens like Apple and Kindle are really fairly silly. The whole book technology stack just isn't that daunting, In a week a guy like me can have a publisher up and running with an app that will let their customers pay for and access ebooks over the net. Yes, Amazon is big and they are slick and they'll always be an attractive marketplace, but the barriers to entry are now too low to let them rake everyone over the coals and get high monopoly rents.

Re:Sorry Charlie

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Publisher? Distributor? Retailer? When you are talking about pure e-commerce of digital goods these are distinctions without differences. In the end the guy that has the PDF of Accelerondo gets to decide what it costs and where it gets sold. People will find it and buy it and there are plenty of places that can supply the finding and buying function besides Amazon. They have a viselike grip on nothing.