How Amazon's Ebook Subscriptions Are Changing the Writing Industry

An anonymous reader writes: Amazon is now offering an ebook subscription service — $9.99/month gets you access to 700,000 titles, both self-published and traditionally published. The funds are gathered together, Amazon takes its cut, and the rest is divided up based on how many times a given book was read.

Some authors like it, and some don't, but John Scalzi pointed out that this business model is notable for being different from how the writing industry has worked in the past: "[T]he thing to actively dislike about the Kindle Unlimited 'payment from a pot' plan is the fact that it and any other plan like it absolutely and unambiguously make writing and publishing a zero-sum game. In traditional publishing, your success as an author does not limit my success — the potential pool of money is so large as to be effectively unlimited, and one's payment is independent of any other purchase a consumer might make, or what any other reader might read.

In the traditional publishing model, it's in my interest to encourage readers to read other authors, because people who read more buy more books — the proverbial tide lifts all boats. In the Kindle Unlimited model, the more authors you and everyone else reads, the less I can potentially earn. And ultimately, there's a cap on how much I can earn — a cap imposed by Amazon, or whoever else is in charge of the 'pot.'"

Comments

Rubbish

[Gorobei]

"Absolutely and unambiguously make writing and publishing a zero-sum game"

Um, no - the more readers, the more money. It's not zero sum at all from the writers' point of view.

Of course, back in the old days, people often curled up in a chair and read eight good books simultaneously; writers didn't compete with each other for readers' time and dollars at all.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

You are still free to start your own online retailer

And free to get crushed by Amazon. There's no competing against a behemoth.

You're like the idiots who say "hurr durr either do better or shut your mouth", as if one needs to master everything to be allowed the privilege of speaking their mind. The criticism here isn't even stupid, it's completely valid to think of the consequences a different business model could have on writing.

Re:Encouraging quality

[BarbaraHudson]

This move discourages quality. People will download indiscriminately since the cost is fixed. Which means that crappy writers make as much of the "pot" as good writers, so why strive for quality when you can write 6x as much crap and get paid MORE than the person who writes 1 good book. Good writers shouldn't subsidize crappy ones.

Remember the saying "bad money drives out good"? People will horde their genuine currency and try to pass off counterfeits as quickly as possible to the next sucker. Same as people now are selling Rubles for Euros and Dollars.

Re:Freedom

[AchilleTalon]

As long as Amazon is getting the best price for the customer, no one will ask the State to regulate anything. Typically, the State regulate when the customers are complaining about abuse from the monopoly, as long as a monopoly doesn't abuse from its position no one complains. So, a monopoly should take care of the largest group in order to avoid the intervention of the State.

However, abusing from its position on the authors may also harm the customers at the end, since the authors will have no more interest in writing given the are abused and the customers will then have not longer have new books to discover.

A monopoly can be a good thing, but it is rarely a good thing since the equilibrium is hard to reach.

iBooks

[Tony Isaac]

This is just iTunes, but for books. The book industry was just a little slower to go digital. They will go, kicking and screaming, but they will go. And the result will be a win for consumers, and even a win for authors (maybe except for the few who are household names).

I love Shashdotters, but....

[ThomasBHardy]

I love Slashdot and Slashdotters. But in this case I'm kind of taken back by the responses.

Being married to an Author and knowing many, many authors, I can point out a few things:

Most authors, beyond the "super big names" struggle to make even a moderate living off of their books. When these folks try out a new system like the Amazon plan, and they find the are making less, we're not talking about folks who used to make 3 million, now only making 2.5 million. We're talking about someone who might be making for example 30k per yea,r making so much less that they are forced to cease writing as a vocation.. It's directly impactful, and the impact is not tied to quality of the book. Rather, the impact is books with catchy titles and sales pitches getting more downloads and making more money, regardless of quality. "hey, it's free, I'll click that since there's no downside to me for doing so." This leads to other books making less of the allotted bucket of funds. When spending money on books, folks tend to check reviews, read the sample download or use various criteria to filter down their selection to what they enjoy reading. So better books get rewarded. With the new plan, shotgun approaches become the norm.

Lets try it another way. Say tomorrow, there was one major store through which the majority of all software (personal, business, etc.) and all IT services (Ops, support, admin, etc, each treated as a service ticket item) were offered and the owners of that store decided "Forget what people pay today for software and services, we'll sell them anything and everything for $10 a month and just divvy up profits as we see fit, And we'll do it without reporting to anyone how the process works or what actual counts occurred, we'll just send them a check."

How would you feel about that when it was your app that you worked for a year and you usually make about $50k per year. But now when another app AngryBirds sells 30 million copies, your get a check for $5 for the month for your app despite people still downloading downloading it because statistically it's insignificant?

Or how about your IT job that you now get paid 1$ per service ticket because a billion other service tickets get processed as well? Did you enjoy working all day for $20?

While it's easy to assume that anything cheaper is better, remember to take into account that the cheaper may be coming at the actual workers pocket. I'd expected to see Slashdotters more upset at the middleman holding the actual workers over a barrel.

Re:Freedom

[OhPlz]

Your premise is that Amazon is the only seller of books? B&N is still around, last I checked. Heck, public libraries still exist, and you don't even have to pay to access the books there. This anti-capitalist meme is getting really tiresome. People shop Amazon because it's convenient and generally affordable. Want to compete? Provide something better.

Re:"Tradition?"

[david_thornley]

Not bad, up to the last paragraph. Scalzi is used to competing with other demands for the readers' money, and is not asking to be paid for nothing. He'd like to be paid every time somebody buys "Redshirts" or something in the Human War series. This is competition in the market. I have no idea how you could possibly have misinterpreted him that badly.

What he is complaining about is that he would be put in direct competition with all other authors, and that the amount he would be paid would be capped by another entity. Currently, he benefits by people buying his books, whether or not they buy anybody else's. With this model, if somebody read one of his books and no other that month, he'd make $X, while if said person read one of his books and one of somebody else's books that month, he'd make $X/2. In the traditional model, he'd make $Y if somebody bought one of his books, regardless of anything else the reader did that month. Similarly, in the traditional model, if he wrote something that sold like the Harry Potter series, he could make any amount of money. (Rowling is reportedly a billionaire.) In this model, he'd make a certain chunk of what Amazon had allocated.

In other words, Scalzi wants to compete in an open market, where he can succeed or fail along with others, and where he can potentially make a whole lot of money. That's a boat that should float, as far as I'm concerned.