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Amazon Isn't Killing Writing, the Market Is
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has been struggling for price control of the book and ebook markets for years, battling publicly and privately with publishers while making a lot of authors nervous. With yesterday's announcement of "Kindle Unlimited," a Netflix-like ebook subscription service, Amazon is reaching their endgame in disrupting the book-selling business. But there are other companies doing the same thing, and an article at TechCrunch makes the case that it's the general market, rather than any company in particular, that's making it harder for authors to earn a living. "Driving the prices lower isn't likely to expand the market of readers, since book prices don't seem to be the deciding factor on whether someone reads a book (time is). But those lower prices directly shrink the incomes of authors, who lack any other means of translating their sales into additional revenue. That's why I don't think the big revolution for writers and other content producers will come from Amazon, but rather from startups like Patreon, which allow producers to build audiences directly and develop their own direct subscription model with their most fervent fans."
the whole "print is dead" meme is a myth
people want relevant, accurate news more than ever
people want entertainment that is not formulaic & trite more than ever
the ***ONY*** reasons authors, musicians, journalists and other "content creators" are suffering is because of:
***bad business management of the companies they work for***
these unscrupulous business managers are trained to understand "business" and "profit" as ONLY SHORT TERM METRICS that are abstracted into more "numbers" that they have to "hit"
it's based on the **incorrect** concept that people don't care if their journalism, art, music is quality or not...they cynically assume that people will watch whatever is on TV, read whatver books are put in front of them, and listen to trite, predictable music indefinitely
ITS NOT TRUE
people want variety, they notice repetition...
the only reason is that we, as consumers, have been conditioned by bullshit marketing to have ***REDUCED EXPECTATIONS OF VALUE***
this is a hoodwink, plain and simple
Thank you Dave Raggett
My grandfather had the same problem as a liftboy. The combined forces of Otis and Schindler forced him out of a job.
It's called 'progress'.
Citation please: Less than 50 musicians in history have gotten $10-15 per album from mass sales. The ones who have are all truly indie artists, who are playing on the street and coffee shops.
Any author can publish nearly anything he wants through Kindle electronically, or CreateSpace in paper and he has control of the price at either one. Both have competitors too, like LightningSource, that have better access to dirt-world bookstores and provide electronic publishing services. If these authors want to be paid more per book, there is not a blessed thing stopping them from doing it right now.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
I don't see anything in the rest of your post that supports the idea that the reading is about to become a lost art practiced by only a few.
There is literally too much content and most of it looks awful.
I took a look Amazon's kindle unlimited this afternoon and what I saw were an incredible number of science fiction authors that I never heard of, pushing out what the blurbs and titles made look like bad romance novels in space.
The functions of the editor and publisher are just missing from this mish mash. If you look at paper publishing it's a large financial commitment to publish and market any given book and most would never pay back the investment. Hence publishers to market the works and editors to select quality material were immensely valuable and helped make certain that if an authors work was published it had a better than random submission chance of earning back it's costs.
Now the cost to "Publsish" as an e-book is minimal and much of what would never have been published in the past is flooding all over the place. So you have lots of "Authors" self publishing and not making money. This really shouldn't come as a shocker. The problem is there are so many of them they overwhelm everything else. If I read correctly Kindle Unlimited has 600,000 titles. It's just numbers but there really just aren't enough people in the world to see that most of those authors make a living from being published there.
Amazon has done a TON for indy authors and they've shared their profits. When the big publishers tried to force higher prices on Amazon I stopped buying. You would think these asshats would've learned from the music industry - especially since their wares are so much smaller when downloaded and lose no fidelity at all. Now they've all had to settle for big fines but do you think that this will bring readers back into the fold? I doubt it.
This guy has some interesting information about what's going on with out the big publisher bias - other than the fact that his bias is he hates big publishing lol
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
As an example, I used to read a lot of magazines but once the Internet was invented it was much easier visiting websites than buying Playboy.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Sorry, lost the thread.
With e-books becoming more dominant and less money coming into the industry, the bookstores die (they're already highly marginal now). With bookstores' death, so go the publishers (after all, any established author will make more money from self-publishing and now the *one* (incredibly important) thing the publishers offer - shelf space - is gone).
With publishers gone, we all essentially become slush pile readers. The books are nearly free, but the constraint is *time*, not money, and with the publishers gone, we're now looking at instead of 1 in 10 new books being decent, we're looking at 1 in 1,000. And quite frankly, there's movies and Angry Birds on our e-book readers that have a much higher payoff rate.
Established authors do okay, but the discovery rate of new authors drops like a stone. Sure a handful get discovered each year, but the current book industry discovers thousands each year. (Where discover means they are distinguished enough from the crowd to have a *chance* at success.) As there are fewer and fewer new authors making it (but more and more authors writing for at least a generation while writing is culturally relevant), the signal to noise ratio keeps dropping.
Even worse, businesses realize that while selling books doesn't make much money, selling services to desperate authors makes a killing. If you are browsing to find a new author you know nothing about, Amazon currently shows us the top 1,000 or so books from mainstream publishers, with a few self-published in the mix. At some point, it makes a *lot* more money by showing us the top 1,000 books from the authors willing to pay the most.
And unfortunately, unlike mainstream publishers, who invest in a book not because they love it, but because they believe it will be what you want to read, would-be self-published authors aren't buying advertising based on the books quality, but on their own personal resources.
Amazon, et al. will make a lot of money for decades even as the book market to readers collapse.
Of course, old favorites won't disappear. They'll be a handful of new discoveries each year from self-publishing. Enough that books won't be "dead". But the idea that book reading will become marginal enough that it's cultural significance will essentially be irrelevant.
i.e. like poetry.
"Techcrunch" and particularly their head honcho Masnick are unapologetic corporate shills.
It used to be that if you wanted to learn a new skill picking up a book and reading about it was the most commonly available option. For many skills a quick how-to video on YouTube is sufficient. Books will never go away completely but they aren't always the best and/or only commonly available option.
Anybody see where I left my buggy whip?
My issue with subscriptions is that companies tend to not pay the content makers much.
In the past, you made an album as a musician, you got $10-$15.
You are correct that companies don't pay content producers enough. However, your knowledge of how things 'used to be' is badly flawed.
No one in the history of the music industry has ever gotten paid $10 per album sold. Even the biggest names rarely get as much as $2. Many 'big name' artists have sold millions of albums and were paid as little as 50 cents per album.
"With publishers gone, we all essentially become slush pile readers."
Sure, I decide which font I use on my device, which font size, margin, line spacing and so on, if the author knows where to click for the spellchecker, I'm good with the slush.
All the 25 professions that got axed were just useful when printing on a specific size of dead tree.
I say: Good riddance.
The real problem is too many middle men. Publish a DRM-Free ebook on your own website and I will buy.
"eBook publishers aren't even needed. Software to convert DOC/LaTeX to ePub &c. will do the trick, with proofreaders/editors employed separately, and hosting services a dime a dozen. All that remains is a searchable database, which is a high school project."
That's Calibre, database included. With a few torrents you have the library of congress on your machine.
The author doesn't agree to anything, the publisher does *
* speculation
And even those are not earning much money.
In a interview a few years ago with Ani DiFranco, the report was gushing on how much higher her margins, as a independent artist, than The Dave Mathew Band. Which made DiFranco laugh because The Dave Mathew Band was making so much more money. DiFranco pointed out that going independent was about freedom of control not about the money.
It is not about margins it is about market structure. Piracy has trained consumers that music should be cheap.
Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn's experience with Youtube, and music publishers basically summed it up like this:
You can either go to a studio, sign a contract and /maybe/ make back your advance and /possibly/ hit the lottery and fill arenas
or
Cut out the middle-man and get more direct support and actually make a living. Nataly set up a Kickstarter for her first album and got 5x more than she expected.
Thus the motivation for Patreon.
Watch this interview:
Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Part 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And skip (if you want, the cover is pretty darn good) to the end of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
--
BMO
Bookstores aren't dying.
BIG bookstores are dying. The independent bookstores seem to be multiplying, after what seemed like iminent death at the hands of Borders, B&N and BAM.
Borders is gone. B&N is smaller, and BAM is simply disgusting and I won't go there ever again after going there once (it's a southern 'christian' company and it shows, especially in the whole two shelves of science books they had - I re-shelved Behe's "darwin's black box" in Fantasy). And when I was at BAM, I swear it was a whole lot of floor space for too few customers. Its days are numbered. Here in the Northeast, anyway.
But indie book shops where you get personal assistance and customer service? There's a renaissance.
Amazon isn't killing them. Amazon is killing the book-megastore.
--
BMO
Not even big musicians ever got $10-$15. Artists typically would get anywhere from 8 to 14 percent and major stars would get 20 percent of album sales. Even after inflation adjustments you're only talking about $5 per album at the high end. What happened was album prices went down - If albums stayed in line with inflation they'd be $100 per album now. http://theunderstatement.com/p...
Book prices are going the opposite direction! A mass market paperback in 1975 cost $1.35, adjusted for inflation that's about $5.97. The average mass market price now? Around $8. 25% higher. The issue with books is that publishers create these insane contracts to allow them to suck every last penny out before cutting a royalty cheque. So if you take the adjusted amount a 1975 author could typically expect $0.59 per copy sold, today's author should be able to expect $0.80 per copy sold right? In reality because of the contract loopholes they end up getting at most $0.32 per copy sold.
So authors are typically being payed 60-70% less than in 1975. In addition to this the number of titles published per year has skyrocketed - 135,000 titles are published every year now. That's a lot of competition just within the industry let alone competing for peoples most valuable thing: time. There's going to be a major contraction in the book market to correct for this regardless of what Amazon does.
It only takes something like 1000-2000 regular donors to keep a writer in reasonable comfort. In the age of the Internet, that is really not a lot. As good writers want to write and are typically not motivated by money unlike the publishers that just try to get rich on their backs, this is all it takes. Of course, publishers will fight this tooth and nail, as it threatens their existence. An existence that benefits absolutely nobody but themselves though, so their demise will be something eminently welcome. I predict this will not kill all publishers though. There are those that actually respect their authors and customers, are not primarily motivated by money, and have a positive effect on the overall process. These will remain. I doubt however that any of the large publishers will be among the survivors.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Could you please cite evidence for this "renaissance"? While local smaller bookstores are hanging on, they aren't surviving as bookstores per se: they have massively cut the floor space dedicated to books and instead are selling hipster accoutrements: tea sets, Lomography cameras, vinyl records, and hip stationary. Reading is down considerably in recent years, and what books are read can be had cheapest online.
That is how I published my PhD. The "publisher" took a small cut to get it an ISBN and to have it added to some catalogs, but proposed a very reasonably priced printer that he has a deal with for it. (Physical copies were mandatory.) All rights for electronic publishing remain with me. The book itself is LaTeX, and for proofreading, I paid $1000 to a lady that offers this as a service and did a pretty good job of it. A fiction author could possibly get away with having some loyal fans do the proofreading for free in exchange for early access. And these days, a fiction author does not need to produce physical copies, those that want one could easily be served by book-on-demand systems.
The only people that will suffer under this system is those that produce trash (not the genre) and the publishers that have become superfluous. Of course, editors still have value, and some authors will want to retain the services of one. But there is absolutely no reason to not hire them directly, either for a cut or for a fixed or per-effort fee.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I think freedom of control is hugely valuable to artists. However are they going to experiment and evolve their craft without it?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Professional editing isn't just about the appearance of a text on the page, it can also be about making the text coherent and understandable. Kindle-only books on Amazon are often riddled with errors like one passage accidently moved to the wrong part of the book by a careless cut-and-paste operation, a footnote number linking to a different footnote that has nothing to do with the passage in question, or confusing, non-standard terminology for the field in quetion. Sometimes hyperlinks, whether because of improper formatting or negligence on the part of the publisher, don't go to the external sites they should. A spellchecker doesn't catch any of this.
Furthermore, even within ebook publishing, there is still a need for someone more computer savvy than the average author to have a look at the manuscript. For hyphenation to work correctly in next-generation e-readers (ditto for audiobook support), someone has to tag foreign-language words with the right ISO-639 tags. Image floating is still difficult to get right and requires some human intervention.
Online shopping was going to kill brick and mortar entirely....
At least that was the story 15 years ago.
Brick and mortar retail is still there and taking up more real-estate than ever.
>indie bookstores are only for hipsters
Yeah, well, prejudicial bigotry gets you nowhere.
--
BMO
Way to misquote me. I never said that such shops were "only for hipsters". However, there's no denying that in certain markets, hipsters make up a powerful consumer force, and a shop can stay afloat by expanding its stock to meet their demand. However, I do wonder what will happen to these shops when fashion changes, as it inevitably will.
Yeah, I'm still waiting for a citation that the amount of floor space dedicated to books in retail stores (as opposed to other products) has actually increased in recent years.
I can't speak for everybody, of course, but I DO let price dictate if I buy a book or not, even if it's an author I love. And if it's a debut author, or one I haven't read before, I'm unlikely to be thrilled with paying $8+ for a book.
The vast majority of the books I read are on the Kindle. The vast majority of those books are either carefully-chosen self-published authors or books either Amazon and/or the publisher is selling for no more than $6. Publishers that want to continue to insist on "charging" more than $10 for a book are collecting precisely $0 of my reading dollars. (Meaning that they'll collect the same amount of money from me pricing e-books at a $1B/copy.)
Self-publishing is really the way to go these days for new authors. The average traditionally-published manuscript makes $0, as the average manuscript isn't picked up by a publisher at all. And the ones that do get published receive far less support from publishers than they used to, as they have so many imprints now that the effort that can be expended on a random debut author is just about zilch; they get a few review copies sent out, minimal editing services, and maybe a short blurb in a trade rag. With that limp level of support, it's not surprising few debut authors clear their initial advance, when they are only clearing 15% royalties.
Contrast that with the 70% (of a lower price) Amazon is offering on anybody that chooses to post a book. The only additional effort authors must expend is doing their own cover and editing. They were already largely responsible for their own promotion anyway, so that doesn't really change.
In the "good 'ol days" publishers served a real function. They provided substantial editing support, decent promotional effort, and were, in any case, the only game in town. Now the number of books published per year by the traditional publishers has gone up, and the services they provide authors have gone down. They have reduced themselves to nothing more than middlemen between authors and retailers. Nowhere but books and music do we tolerate the middlemen taking such a large chunk of the available money for little more than distribution.
What with 99% of today's authors being business people first, marketing experts second, and authors last, this is a good development.
You're right. But most of the rest of them got big-enough advances from record labels though so that they could try making music for a living for a couple years. The money for those advances came from record sales of the few acts that did make it. Now, there's little money coming in from record sales from the acts that made it - only peasly subscription revenue and $0.99 tracks. Less money coming into the labels, less money going out as advances to artists.
So I go without and am less happy for it.
Indeed, in order to be happy, you must Consume. Consume, Consumer! Consume! I command it! Waste all your money! Consume, Consume, Consume!
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well clearly, their first priority should be evolving photosynthetic capability.
Way to misquote me. I never said that such shops were "only for hipsters".
What a disingenuous complaint.
>mention a whole list of things such as lomography
>claim you're not talking about hipsters.
Yeah, whatever, man.
--
BMO
Damn, son, do you have any reading comprehension skills? Of course I mentioned hipsters. The point of my post above was that offering non-book items of interest to this lucrative demographic is one major way that bookstores are staying afloat. But how you got from that to your misquote "Indie bookstores are only for hipsters" is beyond me: bookstores continue to offer items that interest non-hipsters, but they simply aren't as powerful a profit centre.
you are believing the marketing...you are accepting *their* framing of the situation
it is a false choice...many excellent films are also hugely popular **when they get the marketing push**
producing shitty movies still costs alot of money, ex: ***TRANSFORMERS SERIES***
end of discussion
absolutely hook line and sinker...you are part of the problem
YES...people often just want to be distracted...busy people working hard dont have time to curate their entertainment like some of us
THAT DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE RIGHT
just because people will accept the best of what is available doesnt mean that ***if they had a choice*** they wouldn't choose the better option
your point is like saying "People go to Wal-Mart...it's hugely popular...that proves that people would rather have a cheap chinese made bicycle rather than a US made one"
Wal-Mart gets all the customers not because of quality, but because of *******ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY IN THE MARKET*********
it's an engineered lack of options...it's obvious and you are a dupe for not seeing it
Thank you Dave Raggett
The tactile experience of actually holding a book in your hand, being able to flip the pages, is far better than anything offered by current electronic devices. Sure, the various e-readers are convenient, but convenience isn't everything. Book printing and book reading aren't disappearing anytime soon. In fact, I'm seeing more small bookstores pop up as people realize the limitations of the online experience and go back to browsing.
"Professional editing isn't just about the appearance of a text on the page, it can also be about making the text coherent and understandable."
I have a copy of "Finnegan's Wake" on my coffee table saying otherwise. :-)
"The tactile experience of actually holding a book in your hand, being able to flip the pages, is far better than anything offered by current electronic devices."
Flip pages? Such modern things are just for young whippersnappers. I prefer scrolls, one long page you can scroll. Even computers use that method.
Although my father prefers stone tablets, he says the weight gives it a sense of importance that modern things like scrolls, papyrus and 'books' miss.
That actually isn't what Happend at all. You need to go further back than 1998.
Not to mention that your prices are way off - someone like Madonna gets $4-5 bucks an album, and that's the super-high end.
Cheap singles are nothing new. Singles drove the industry from the 60's through the 80's. Then labels slowly stopped releasing singles, forcing folks to buy an entire album for one song. This really hit the mainstream when Britney Spears first album, "...Baby One More Time". The title song was a huge radio and MTV hit, but it was unavailable as a single, and was only available when they finally dropped the album, forcing folks to buy the whole album to get the song (with the album filled largely with filler like "Email My Heart"). This resulted in an instant #1 album.
By holding back singles, they forced folks to spend much more on albums, which became standard practice - and it's no coincidence that this coincided with the rise of Napster because it was the only way folks could just get one single song without spending $15-20. It was a direct response to taking away choice from the market place.
There is a lot more to it before and after, but that's the basic gist - how the labels basically created the whole download environment by manipulating the market just as the technology became available to circumnavigate the entire thing. Since then they have played catch up and obviously largely lost in the long run.
This is also why your average AAA-list concert act sells tickets starting at $150-300 - because the record companies don't get a cut of that, and it's where they make the bulk of their money. Not that it hasn't always really been that way, of course.
Finnegans Wake (note that there is no apostrophe) is entirely coherent and enjoyable as long as one has the linguistic background to understand the constant (and rather tiresome) punning in the book. In any event, this particular book is a case for the value of editors, as the Rose & Oâ(TM)Hanlon edition is vastly superior to the error-ridden text now in the public domain and widely sold.
This. As is often the case with /., it's an all or nothing deal. There's no way in hell that anything the publishers or record labels provide the authors and artists could actually be worthwhile. What antiquated notion! Anybody can produce a bestseller in their bedroom or record the best label of the year in their garage.
Editors are very important. They're the sanity check of the author. They're a reliable and honest reader. They help form the books by taking the often jumbled and incoherent source material that was jotted down in hundreds of sittings, sometimes in the wrong order, and shaping that into the final product. While some authors can do without them, few books would be just as good (let alone better) without an editor's involvement. This is also why good publishers can be distinguished from bad publishers on multiple levels, not just on who they sign up.
The same thing can be said about record labels, but I'm not going to go into detail. The point is: YES the publishers, record labels and all that have been exploiting content creators and taking a much too large part of the pie. That does not however mean that they are of no use whatsoever.
not at all. You need to ask yourself who has disposable income. It's mostly teenagers, They're young, and stuff that's repetitious to you is brand new to them. . There's a smattering of young married women (who, as it turns out, make most of the buying decisions in a family after the teenage years, and yes I know not all of them are married any more). But a more discerning is usually made up of middle aged men who don't have much in the form of disposable income (nerds aside)
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Poetry dug its own grave. It's hard to have sympathy with them.
"Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's," wrote Philip Larkin, "and everybody else can fuck off."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So Robert Plant was way ahead of his time!
Piracy has trained consumers that music should be cheap.
In case you hadn't noticed, these days people expect EVERYTHING to be cheap. Well, except CEOs, anyway.
Market invisible hand fails here, it seems better suited at destroying value than creating it.
And we even know why: market invisible hand theory relies on a few assumptions, one of them being that products are identical and that buyers' choices are only driven by price. Once we say that "book prices don't seem to be the deciding factor on whether someone reads a book", we know it will not work. If producing books is considered important, then the market should be regulated.
They tried that. Several cities ended up outlawing it, threatening to put people like Julie Bass in jail for growing victory gardens in their front yards.
No. Naming yourself after something that does photosynthesis does not give you the ability to also do photosynthesis. That's just stupid.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I agree with you that an editor provides valuable service. This means an author needs to work this service into her budget. How much does it typically cost for a private author, as opposed to a major publisher, to hire an editor?
"Of course, old favorites won't disappear. They'll be a handful of new discoveries each year from self-publishing. Enough that books won't be "dead". But the idea that book reading will become marginal enough that it's cultural significance will essentially be irrelevant."
More books or at least book-length works are being published now than in the past. So a few percentage of good books out of a couple of million bad books is still a lot.
This development parallells the development of culture in other fields, such as music. Before the nineteenth century, you could probably count on your fingers and toes the number of composers who were as good as Beethoven and Mozart, since any would-be Beethoven would need not just be talented but had to live near a place where he could hear good live music that he could learn to imitate first then later surpass with masterpieces of his own.
With the development of recorded music and mass-produced musical instruments, any middle-class person of even mediocre musical talent could listen to good or nearly good music just just by switching on the turn table and later the cassette and CD players.
Today, people have greater access to writing and greater access to a possible audience. Many of today's "books" are actually written in "submarine" form, probably serialized in the writer's blog or written as fan faction. And so, the audience even gets access to the act of writing itself. Writers who blog their novels get feedback from readers whose collective comments effectively make them "crowd" editors, similar to the way Wikipedia works.
What you lament is the coming demise of writing and culture is no more than the death of the rock star, or the Shakespeares or Beethovens of the past because their numbers have multiplied through the spread of mass culture.
Who the hell are you to tell other people which movies, or any products for that matter, they must and must not like?
Wonder what the public key field is for?
So Robert Plant was way ahead of his time!
Not to mention a head in his time, and, if he wanted it, getting head all the time.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Publishers that want to continue to insist on "charging" more than $10 for a book are collecting precisely $0 of my reading dollars.
Where did you get $10 as your price ceiling? For example, if you attend school and discover that a class you're taking requires a textbook that costs more than $10, do you drop that class? I say this in the context of having bought a DRM-free copy of Edenics, an etymological science fiction book by Isaac Mozeson, for $15.
Apart from distribution, publishers used to perform two important services: editing manuscripts into something enjoyable to read, and promoting worthy books. How would Amazon prefer that those services be performed?
Editors are very important. They're the sanity check of the author. They're a reliable and honest reader. They help form the books by taking the often jumbled and incoherent source material that was jotted down in hundreds of sittings, sometimes in the wrong order, and shaping that into the final product.
If actual editing was still happening, I would agree with you - but my experience as an avid reader tells me publishers stopped doing any significant editing 20-30 years ago.
#DeleteChrome
AFAIK, eBook sales went up to around 15% and stayed there. Does anyone have any more up to date info? Of course Amazon reports that its sales overtook physical books but that's the business they're in and it isn't representative of sales overall.
I love gadgets and totally get the potential for eReaders and eBooks, however, my experiences with them have been so poor (buying, reading, trying to find passages to cite, dealing with DRM, etc.) that I only buy physical books now. Even with academic papers, I'd rather print them out (I don't own a printer so I have to go to the print shop down the road) so I can comfortably and conveniently annotate and highlight texts. Yes, it's technically possible to do it on an eReader but it just isn't practical enough to be productive.
eReaders and eBooks will have to get a whole lot better to compete with physical books.
Less than 50 musicians in history have [...]
Fewer than.
But the idea that book reading will become marginal enough that it's cultural significance will essentially be irrelevant. i.e. like poetry
Well, that's different; people don't read poetry now because no one is writing good poetry anymore. At best you'll get something on level of Longfellow's Hiawatha, but I can't think of any recent poetry that even reaches that level.
The reason poetry is dead is because of writers, not because people aren't willing to read it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If actual editing was still happening, I would agree with you - but my experience as an avid reader tells me publishers stopped doing any significant editing 20-30 years ago.
They're depending on the author's agent to handle that now, and hand them a complete book ready to send for typesetting. It doesn't always work out...
And with some authors you can see that as they got famous they got to tell the editor to get lost a lot more. JK Rowling is a great example-- the early books were fun reads and short. As the franchise got bigger, the books got longer and lots of fluff got left in. She also would introduce new characters at the drop of a plot hole, then abandon them later without explanation.
Wal-Mart is a know exploiter of labor & is roundly hated for their business practices
the fact that you somehow idealize their outsourcing of small town America indicates further discussion with you will be unfruitful
Watch this documentary to start educating yourself: Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005)
Thank you Dave Raggett
I've found the opposite. My local Chapters is good at stocking mostly big names. However, since I picked up a Kindle a few years ago, I've found tons of good authors I'd not heard of before. Yes, there is some formulaic drivel, but the biggest problem for the most part is a few typos here and there.
How often do you review a book before buying it at a bookstore? At least online, I see a bunch of reviews and can read what people have to say before I buy. The worst book I got was actually from a bookstore. Perhaps it might have come up with a good plot, but the terrible repetition and generally poor editing made it unreadable
some crooked fsker went and downmodded all my responses
***i protest these downmods b/c they are not deserved***
my posts have always been on topic, IMHO interesting, and at least involves direct clash of ideas
I WAS DOWNMODDED FOR PERSONAL/POLITICAL REASONS NOT BECAUSE OF MY IDEAS BEING WRONG
cowards show yourselves, and explain as an AC or GTFO
Thank you Dave Raggett
you're reductive notion, that anything that sells is therefore 'awesome' and worthy of praise
HORSESHIT
you're blatantly wrong about this, and it's common knowledge
Wal-Mart is easily an evil, despotic purveyor broken dreams
Thank you Dave Raggett
You're right. But most of the rest of them got big-enough advances from record labels though so that they could try making music for a living for a couple years. The money for those advances came from record sales of the few acts that did make it. Now, there's little money coming in from record sales from the acts that made it - only peasly subscription revenue and $0.99 tracks. Less money coming into the labels, less money going out as advances to artists.
Having known musicians that have landed contracts, they do NOT give you enough to live on at all. They give you enough to get some new equipment, then gouge them with paying them for the studio, recording, editing, graphics, videos, etc. All which have to be pay back (and you are paying more if you would of found your own places to do that stuff).
And record companies are still making plenty of money selling stuff these days.
Be seeing you...
They are like real estate agents. There are more of them chasing the same pie. Markets forces will win eventually and we'll get fewer new books because that is what the market is asking for.
Don't blame this on Amazon.
I subscribe to emusic. Because they still provide DRM free mp3 tracks. As soon as DRM hits, I'm done. It's like $12/mo, for $0.50 tracks. Sometimes I don't feel like I want to get any music, but every 30 days I gotta work up the effort and make a selection. And it ends up being pretty neat stuff. Also, because I paid for it all, in the future when they create a total intellectual lockdown, and there will be police raids reviewing everyone's computer for intellectual property and copyright violating stuff, I get to keep the emusic stuff for sure. I also made a collection in a pile of boxed software like MS DOS and Windows 95, which I don't really use right now, but want to have the option to go back to if I feel like it, that they may raid my home and computers for and I'd still have official right to use. Prices for these oldschool things are very cheap on Ebay, and they are still very available, which may not be the case in 10 years, especially when the intellectual property raids become commonplace in your homes. They are probably gathering data about all your files through web browsers and operating systems, and eventually you will be forced to keep all of them on the cloud for free review, so in those days I can keep all my emusic downloads having paid for them as opposed to all the youtube videos and porn image samples that I found and downloaded for free. In fact I keep a separate folder just for youtube, knowing that that's the first thing to nuke or agree with the authorities to get nuked when you get raided. Porn the same. One of the reasons to save porn is that it's available in present computing technology with present formats, and if the future brings you some stupid format or hardware that's impossibly cumbersome to use, you can go back to it, sort of grandfathered rights, like you can go back to antique cars that are not chipped, therefore not remote controlled, where Da Man will send you into an accident and either kill you or blame the accident on you, when in fact he's remote controlling your car. Yeah chips makes cars more fuel efficient, but also unsafe from the remote control perspective. You don't know what a chip does, it's not possible to dissect a chip and figure out what it does, even a 3 legged device that looks like a transistor, could pretend being a transistor until some zero day when it switches on to being the equivalent of a whole supercomputer cpu, via serial communication on the printed circuit board tracks. Only if you made the chip do you know what it does, and even then you're vulnerable to it being replaced by an identical looking, identical acting, but payloaded fake chip, while you sleep. So anyway, you have some kind of grandfathered rights with antique jpg pictures, or at least you can bury them in your backyard from authorities doing house raids. Also a lot of the nude pictures say low resolution sample, subscribe for high resolution, so they are kinda like advertising, that you get for free, but the creator still retains copyright, so it gets complicated. It's like making a living on promotional samples when it comes to toothpaste, soap, shampoo, cookies, etc., especially when the market is flooded with free samples, and when it comes to porn, the market is indeed flooded, because it's easier to make a nude picture than to write a book. The basic issue with intellectual property pricing is that the incremental cost of production is zero, so the long term equilibrium price is zero. By the way I bought an organic chemistry book from Google play for like 5 or 8 bucks, having no idea it would be DRM'd, so I'm not buying anything from Google if they are pimping DRM crap, but surprisingly the book had a great quality, by authors from India, on the level of a $350 college textbook, for less than $10. When international competition sets in and the incremental cost of production is $0, what's driving down intellectual property prices is not entitites like Amazon, but simply massive global competition.
nospam007, can you name me a dozen self-published authors you read regularly? Half-dozen?
I'm honestly hoping the answer is yes, but I think it's likely the answer is no. (Or you're a heavy fanfic reader, in which case as long as your tastes don't change, you'll do just fine.)
Anyway, my point is that it's not the editing (okay, the editing is really, really useful), it's the acquisitions.
Of a 1,000 books on the slushpile, about 10-20 are what I would call "publishable". i.e. they've got a decent shot at being enjoyable. (Books outside of that range might have an outside shot at being enjoyable, but are essentially part of the "million words of garbage" that each author needs to write just to get good enough at their craft that they have a chance at being successful.)
So, the primary job of the publisher/editor is not so much to refine a book, and to act as the filter. Without them, I'm almost certainly spending at least 10 times as much time to find a book that I enjoy as much as I do now.
And when the enjoyment/time ratio goes that low, I stop reading...
And we see this. There are probably 10-100 thousand books self-published each month. How many new authors from the self-published world make it onto the radar of even a low midlist writer. One a month? Two? And it's not that there's not good stuff out there in the self-publishing world - it's that there's no means of discovering it without reading the hundreds of not-yet-ready-for-publication books that no-one wants to read without being paid for it.
I'd love to see self-publication become a viable option. But better brains than mine have been trying for years, and the best they've come up with is something that's going to be a pale shadow of the size of the current industry, read by a societally insignificant number of readers.
That's why I'm not optimistic for the book industry's future.
Oh come on. I got a good laugh out this, and I disagree with his premise.
Indeed, in order to be happy, you must Consume. Consume, Consumer! Consume! I command it! Waste all your money! Consume, Consume, Consume!
There's no purpose to money if it isn't making you happy. Indeed, what *isn't* a waste of money?
And sadly for my heirs, I am not one of those who is made happy simply by seeing a large number just sitting there in my bank account deposit book while I sit on a park bench with a discarded newspaper for company :-).
So, yes. I'll keep consuming books as long as they keep publishing ones that I like and can find.
How is renting a book for a month any different than borrowing that same book from the library for a month (as far as the publisher is concerned)?
As long as Amazon has bought enough "copies" of the book to cover everyone who is reading that book at any given time, then the publisher has already made their money.
It's possible that amazon IS screwing over the publishers, by either paying too low of a price per copy or by not paying for all the copies in circulation, but that has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the rental service itself.
It takes time and effort to create a novel - even a crappy one. One of the authors that I read frequently puts out about two novels per year and spends 40-50 hours per week writing. It takes me a weekend to read her novel. Even if a musician gets $0.05/track, they get something and they can play a concert and sell t-shirts, or fan club memberships, etc. What can an author do? They don't do public performances, or have fan clubs, or sell T-shirts.
There was never much money in creative writing, and the subscription service isn't going to put food on the table for authors. So I guess you give away your first few novels and hope you can raise enough to eat via Patreon.
Sounds really bleak.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
There's no purpose to money if it isn't making you happy.
What makes me happy is financial independence. I save a large majority of my income, invest it, and spend extremely little compared to most others that make as much as I do all so I can retire 30 years before any of them likely do, without even taking into account social security.
The real problem is that people do not live within their means (which includes saving and investing money) and buy things that do not truly make them happy. I seriously doubt you're any less happy when you aren't able to spend money on an app. If you are, you may need to find other hobbies.
So no, my money is not just sitting in a bank account; it's going to guarantee that I can become financially independent and retire before a grand majority of the population.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In the past, you made an album as a musician and you got $1 or $2. After you paid out your advances, and the accounting game was rigged to make it very difficult to do that. Now you make the album yourself, and you actually make $10 when you sell a copy of it at your gig. Or you put your songs on iTunes and make 50 cents per song sale. (This is all assuming you DON'T have a major label contract.)
> - it's that there's no means of discovering it without reading the hundreds of not-yet-ready-for-publication books that no-one wants to read without being paid for it.
That's strange, there's so many sites like metacritic, reddit, and even slashdot that allow people to rate the content they view/read. Too bad this can't be applied to books.
You don't know about the music industry, that is okay. Here is how it works: the album sales go almost entirely to the record company. The artist might see $1 per album.
The artist keeps most of the performance revenue. This is why there are old rockers like the Rolling Stones who keep playing from their deathbeds. It is great money, and the only great money the performers have access to.
And the radio money is divided between the songwriter and the record company. Lots of musicians who are well known but not in the top-xx list actually make their money from being the songwriter on their own songs that get radio play. Or, very commonly, all their money comes from being the songwriter on covers! For example the song Jet Airliner was written and recorded by Paul Pena on one of his albums, and then the cover by the Steve Miller Band, who made it a radio hit. Paul Pena was literally living off those songwriter royalties as his health declined.
Artists don't make anything significant from album sales. Sorry you guessed wrong.
I agree. It's the publishers and the retailers that have been raping the readers and the writers forever. I'm self publishing on the internet. Let THEM eat cake...
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
So I really want to be a male prostitute. The problem is that most males want to be having sex most of the time. This means that there isn't much market for the services I want to provide. Not only can I not give my product away, I have to pay people to take it.
The technology we've created has democratized the creation of art, writing and music, in this case. People who want to can. It may be sad that your favorite writer isn't getting rich, but it is great that any idiot who want to try can publish an album or book, even if it never ends up being profitable.
We are heading in the right direction.
Not half as bad as what you've got.
That's strange, there's so many sites like metacritic, reddit, and even slashdot that allow people to rate the content they view/read. Too bad this can't be applied to books.
And notice that despite hundreds of thousands of self-published books, it's not occurring now... Ever considered asking why?
Almost nobody is willing to spend 100-200 hours to find a single book worth reviewing. And, sadly, the very few people who might be willing to do so on an occasional basis are completely eclipsed by desperate authors who have friends "review" or purchase reviews or whatever.. (Not that they are necessarily common, but given how few reviews occur, even 1 in 100 authors means false reviews will eclipse real reviews 10 to 1.)
Closing your eyes and pretending that magic Internet pixies will happily do unpleasant work for free isn't working now. Why should it start working in the future?
(And if you are wondering why it works for music, the answer (1) the investment by the reader/listener is vastly smaller for music - I can listen to music for 3 minutes and decide if I like a piece, as opposed to 2-3 hours for a book and (2) much of the discovery occurs in venues where someone else is doing the filtering for the audience. Open mike nights with no filtering are marginal now. Imagine how they'd do if they featured a single unknown band playing for 2 hours... How many would be willing to sit for weeks to hear one band that was actually decent? (And remember, no talking with friends while listening. This music requires your undivided attention.)
Welcome to the challenges of self-publishing. Sadly, there's no magic here.
I noticed. It's because most people are expected to be cheap, too.
Well, that's different; people don't read poetry now because no one is writing good poetry anymore.
How would you know?
There are *thousands* of poems written and published on the Internet every day and I've no doubt that some of them are good by whatever standard you choose to measure with. The problem isn't that there aren't good poems out there, it's there's no way of filtering the good poems to make it viable for you to find them.
Exactly the problem I foresee with books.
(Small difference - there are poetry publishers. Unfortunately, their standard of good doesn't really match the general populace's, so effectively, poetry that would reach you and me is all self-published. And to no surprise, we don't bother searching.
Given that there is a wealth of high-quality material (more than enough to completely fill how much time I have to read) for less than $10, why pay more?
If publishers choose to charge more than I'm willing to pay for a book, that's their business. And if I choose to not buy said book, that's my business.
Clearly I am advocating for the collapse of civilization as we know it, suggesting that authors get paid more at the same time readers get to pay less.
In in case you prefer a concrete example: I don't think you'll find a lot of people will be sympathetic to whining that The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth costs $36.49 on Kindle.
I wasn't talking about small-press-run reference works, or college textbooks. I, and everybody else in the whole debate, is referring to general-interest fiction and non-fiction works.
That said... why, nearly 30 years after the last time it was edited (or even typeset), does K&R cost $50? For that kind of money, they could at least typeset the thing using technology more recent than what was available in the mid-80's!
I've no doubt that some of them are good by whatever standard you choose to measure with.
I have doubts
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Tens of millions of poems, millions of writers, and you think it unlikely any of them meet your standards?
Wow. Talk about refined tastes :-).
Have you seen the internet? Allow me to introduce you to Myspace.com :)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Ah, but the glory and the tragedy of the Internet isn't that there is *no* gold among the dross, it's that there *is* gold, diamonds even, and we're never, ever going to find it.
An email from Amazon, to authors:
KDP Select authors and publishers will earn a share of the KDP Select global fund each time a customer accesses their book from Kindle Unlimited and reads more than 10% of their book-–about the length of reading the free sample available in Kindle books-–as opposed to a payout when the book is simply downloaded. Only the first time a customer reads a book past 10% will be counted.
The numbers are always a little vague ahead of time. There's a pool of money allotted each month, and that pool is divided among books that are viewed. Originally KDP select was just for lending, but is expanded to include this, now, too. Historically I've seen values around $3+ per loan, often around $3.25. It depends on your pricing and royalty scheme whether this is "good" or not, but at 70% royalties, if you sell your book for around $4.64 or less, this is higher than what you'd make for a straight-up purchase, and if you sell your book for more you're probably "losing" a little money compared to a sale. The thing is, both the lending library and this Kindle Unlimited program basically make the books "free" to the user, so they may be more likely to try something new without the risk of committing money.
I don't think Amazon differentiates royalties based on sales numbers. It's a flat 70% for most books, but 30% for some of the cheapest. (I forget what the cutoff is, but it's easy information to find.)
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Author Eric Flint makes the argument that it takes practice to get good at anything, including writing. If we want good quality creative work (books, music, etc.) then we have to create an environment where authors and musicians and other creative types can actually make a living while creating.
If they can't, it doesn't mean we won't have books or music, but it does mean we won't have *good* books or music. Plenty of "idiots who want to try" can and will step up to publish albums or books, but Sturgeon's Law will have to be revised to say "99.9% of everything is crap."
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Get a card... yes a library card.
Donate the 12x Amazon fee to the local friends of the library
and have at it.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
If you find some, let me know.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm in the process of trying to self-publish some short stories now. The old way of doing this was to find a magazine or anthology related to short works - most of which are extinct today. Like Wikipedia killed Britannica and Encarta, the flood of free quality content today is killing the traditional ways of becoming renown. Trouble is there is so much (and more crud) its getting harder to find - drowning in entropy. The bigger shops like Amazon have done a good job on Kindle Direct Publishing, but the problem is it only seems to work for established authors. And its a fractured market. Even with the Kindle App, a lot of people won't use it... so as a self-publisher you've got to explore other publishing media too (like Kobo, B&N [that doesn't support Canadian authors], iBooks [that requires a Mac and multiple publish steps], and Google Play books [that is so awkward to use many people don't bother]. A publish, stream service kind of makes sense. Writers are burned by royalties anyway. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/07/21/why-amazon-terrifies-publishers-lets-look-at-royalty-statements/)
Amazon - 30% for under $1. Kobo is 45%. And who would pay $1 for a short story when they can buy a novel for a $1? Or even get something free. The price is becoming less meaningful. Amazon will still likely push work through the service that is promoted - leaving out self publishers.
Shameless plug: I'm blogging about my experiences trying these things here (http://selfloathingit.blogspot.ca).
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