Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.'"
In another industry I was closely involved in, this approach significantly increased total revenue. Instead of saying "buy my book for $20", the author can say "get my book and 70,000 others for just $20". Which do you think generates more sales?
In the very successful implementations, the amount paid out was based not just on which content was most viewed, but which generated sales via something like an affiliate code. There may be smaller content which many people will click if it's free, but nobody bought a subscription in order to see that content. Others, such as TAOCP, may have fewer viewers, but those viewers bought the subscription specifically to read TAOCP. TAOCP would be rewarded for bringing buyers.
If the pool is greater than $0, it's a positive sum game for the authors.
If Amazon behaves economically rationally, the pool size should increase with the number of readers.
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.
How is Kindle Unlimited any different from Spotify or any of the other online streaming music services in terms of how royalties are paid?
Launched by Papal Law? Or did you actually mean "cannon"?
And is the Matahorn anywhere near the Matterhorn? Just curious....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
On the other hand, this is a very good example on how specific business practices can hurt quite different areas of endeavour. Bezos started off early and Amazon became an effective monopoly. When a large enough group feels (and proves!) a single provider is hurting them, the State should intervene regulating monopolies; I'm sure that were Amazon to be audited, many strange issues would arise as a result of the strict application of the described scheme.
After all, some market regulation is better for everybody, even if you are free-marketist.
Authors have long suffered the publishers pay them a misery compared to what they earn. I have published very little, and via my university (which means, very little distribution but relatively very good terms). I get 10% of the sales. In the "real world", maybe a third of that is normal.
Now, Amazon is continuing to pay the authors the same 3%. But not only no exchange of tangible goods happens, now we the readers also pay Amazon for the book-of-all-books (that is, the Kindle). Yes, some people will use the Kindle store to read on the computer, tablet or whatnot, but it's definitively a lesser experience.
So anyway, Amazon is still paying something to the publishers (except, of course, for Amazon Direct published works). But given the goods themselves "cost" no money, they are getting *way* more than by selling books — Of course, the authors would prefer their income to increase proportionally as well.
Not shrink proportionally.
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.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Go easy on him. He never got the chance to learn those words by reading them in an ebook, because he was too hung up on the fonts used to get past the first page...
I know we don't RTFA arounf here, but authors don't get paid when the book is downloaded, they get paid when someone reads at least 10% of the book.
How many books have you read, how many tv shows and movies have you watched, that started out good but then didn't live up to their hype or initial promise, but you continued reading / viewing for a while in the hope it gets better because you had already invested time into it before finally throwing in the towel? 10% is too low a minimum. I'd venture that anyone who gives up half way is saying the book is crap.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Your comments are the opposite of what I read on the subject. Kindle doesn't care what you "download". Kindle tracks every page turn. If you don't read the book, it won't count as "read". Do download crap, get 2 pages in, and Kindle knows you read two pages and no more.
If you don't know the basics of how Kindle works, why are you posting so authoritatively on the subject?
Learn to love Alaska
When a half dozen corporations produce and sell everything, capitalism will bleed the lower classes dry.... until the revolution.
Get up!
Fair enough. However, lets say I just bulk downloaded 25 books by Mr. Hack Writer, and I read enough of the first book to determine it is, for me, crap. I'm still going to delete all 25 books, and one read is all he will score from me. On the other hand, if I like an author I tend to plow through a bunch of their books. Good military sci-fi (don't judge) seems to come in series and I will often read a dozen books by one author. The bad writer will not get zero, but the good writer will still get a much greater reward.
Scalzi is also contracted with an old style publisher, so he has a vested interest in railing against anything that doesn't have to go through the winnowing process and can compete with him directly.
The cap on the pot is not imposed by the one controlling the pot, the cap on the pot is a function of the number of subscribers. It is still in your interest to promote the books of others because more quality and varied content means more subscribers and therefore a larger potential pot.
It does change the industry. It is no longer a function of publishers to pick the winners but a function of readers. Everyone can publish. I don't know if Amazon considers reader ratings in their pot distribution but they should.
Or just maybe, what is currently in the short term best interest of the consumers, is not at all in the best interest of independent writers. And just maybe, when Amazon has put all of the other options out of business by pandering to the masses at the expense of the producers, Amazon, just might turn on the consumers and start to gouge them, once they have no where else to turn?
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
My understanding is that only 10% of a book needs to be read to be counted as read. Without a minimum size for what counts as a book this subscription model seems like it favors authors who publish short books. If a book is only 50 pages long, only six pages of it need to be read in order for it to be counted as read. If I'm paying by the individual book I'm more likely to pay attention to reviews before downloading a book. With a subscription model that only requires 10% of a book to be read in order for an author to get part of the pool it seems like authors of short crappy books get subsidized by better authors.
I find their selection is marginally different from Google Books or B&N. However, I also find that inevitably, Amazon has the lower price, for me, than those other two, so that is where I generally buy, especially if it is from an author, or on a subject, I'm not familiar with. Even though I know that Amazon is pandering to me to try to lock me in by habit at the expense of the authors.
For the authors that I know I like, I try to go out of my way to purchase as close to directly through them, or from their recommended source as I can.
I know that buying from Amazon is not in my long term best interest, but for a product I don't know that I will value, even as high as Amazon does, or for a product that I don't know gets any more money to the actual author, rather than just higher profits for the middle men, I'll put my near term interst over speculating that something else is a better long term strategy.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
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.
Achille Talon
Hop!
This would also favor writing shorter books but in a series rather than longer books. I wouldn't release one long book, but rather break it into a trilogy that way I get three reads per person.
Writing has changed a lot over the years.
When Homer (or at least whoever copied him down) and Plato and Vergil and Cicero wrote, an author published (divulgavit = made common or public; publicavit = threw open to the public, also used of public confiscation of private property and of prostitution; in lucem edidit = gave into the light of life) by making a work available for anyone to hear, listen to, or copy. It wasn't paid through sales, but rather supported for by patronage (the rich supported the arts) or own's own income from other sources. It wasn't about profit, and making copies (and making copies available) was a virtuous endeavor also supported by the rich. Manuscript subscriptions (like "Emendavi ego Dracontius") tell scholars who in late antiquity edited copies and recopied them for the benefit of others. This virtue continued to be practiced by monks through the middle ages, who copied older works and wrote new ones and disseminated both across Europe through networks of borrowing and lending that were the key to sustaining and maintaining written culture: we would have no literature from antiquity or the middle ages without the Church's non-profit model of supporting literature through copying and patronage. While books became precious commodities as writing materials grew scarce (while papyrus, bast, and other writing materials were used even for wrapping fish in antiquity, it took a flock of sheep to make a physical book in the middle ages) the "intellectual property" was not regarded as such, but rather as the common inheritance of humanity (the patrimonium humanitatis). Carmina (songs and poetry) and prose alike were no one person's intellectual property: the author could be praised by name, or he could hide under a monk's anonymity, but it wasn't even conceivable that he could restrict the further publication of his works. The Church could try to burn heretical material, just as Roman emperors had tried, but copies often survived somewhere and were recopied; but restricting intellectual property wasn't even a consideration.
Then, in the late middle ages, came Cathedral schools and the first universities, and students began paying to copy books themselves for classes. When the printing press and paper came to Europe, the idea of the privilegium, or exclusive right to furnish copies, was already in place, and books could be issued under copyright. Some authors began to profit from their books, but more often publishing houses did. Songs were still common material, and people sang what they learned without fear of legal retribution. Many authors disapproved of the copyright of privilegium: Erasmus, in a 1586 letter to Jacopo Sadoleto, complains of the copyright (backed by threat of excommunication) given to the Francesco Giulio Calvo: "But since Calvo's publishing house cannot supply copies to all parts of the world, it would be a serious blow to scholarship, in my opinion, if a book of such importance could be obtained only from a single Roman publisher." Books were sometimes copied without privilegium or even against the privilegium of another publishing house, and some authors clung to the tradition of making their work truly public.
Then came the twentieth century and the "Culture Industry" (a term coined by Western Marxists like the Frankfurt School, who despised mass or "low" culture). What had been "culture" and "literature" for ornamenting the soul and improving the mind became "content" to generate revenue streams, mass-produced by division of labor instead of genius and careful cultivation. Although electronic distribution through computers designed to reproduce and spread information meant that books and songs and new forms of art like movies could be distributed for free -- no flocks of sheep required -- nevertheless, pirating an .mp3 of Britney Spears or a copy of that new North Korea movie or some godawful e-book will get you a stiffer sentence than if you shoplifted a copy from the store. The irony is that much of what is now peddled by
Amazon sells pay-per-view reading.
I like buying used books. I like buying used books a lot. I have many books that are decades old. I have some books that are hundreds of years old. If Amazon succeeds with ebooks, 20 years from now there will barely be any access to low cost books at all. There will be nothing available to read that was controversial and got pushed down the Orwellian 'memory hole.'
For each ebook Amazon sells, they can fuck off.
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 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.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
And free to get crushed by Amazon. There's no competing against a behemoth.
Smashwords seem to be doing just fine (see my link). An artist's biggest problem is obscurity not piracy. Amazon is not helping in this regard, and in fact their insistence on distributing only paid-for books and not free ones means that they (Amazon) are actually a poor platform for new authors.
I want people to read my book and remember my name. On Amazon I get maybe 30 downloads when the book goes for free for five days out of every 90. On Smashwords I get many more downloads (200+) in the same time period. Smashwords is helping me be an author, Amazon wants to help me be a business. I want to be an author.
If enough people decide that I'm a good author then I might decide to be a business, but for now I'm content with just being an author, and Smashwords furthers my goal more than Amazon does.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I know we don't RTFA arounf here, but authors don't get paid when the book is downloaded, they get paid when someone reads at least 10% of the book.
Parents point still stands: I published on Amazon. I've still got a collection of short stories on Amazon. To game this system all I have to do is publish all my short stories as different books. Instead of one 40k word book that might get read 10% through, I can have 7 smaller "books" that will almost certainly hold the reader for 10% of each book.
The flat fee incentivises the wrong thing - it provides an incentive for crappy authors and/or crappy books to join en masse. The payoff is so small that any popular author (Stephen King, Pratchett, etc) will be stupid to join. The popular authors *are* the draw, and people who have paid the flat-fee will still shell out extra to get the popular author's latest work if it isn't in the flat-fee library.
So, this model incentivises crap being included and masterpieces being excluded - why do you think that you will see anything different in practice?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I think you missed his context. He was saying that in the past encouraging your own readers to check out other writers works benefited the whole market, whereas now it will dilute the fixed contribution that reader is making over more authors. I have trouble believing that a subscription model is going to bring more people into reading. If someone doesn't read are they really likely to start with a $10 subscription to an overwhelming amount of work, or buy a single book that catches their eye for less? A $10 subscription is great for readers who were already spending more than that, not so much for the authors though.
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.
I'm sorry, but I don't see a problem here... Amazon has made participation in KU completely optional. If Amazon, say, made KU mandatory in order to have your book available on Kindle at all, there might be something to complain about.
But since there IS no such requirement, if you, Author or Publisher, feel you'll make less money via KU vs. only offering stand-alone copies, then don't participate.
The movie industry hardly seems to be dying despite the fact most movies aren't available on NetFlix streaming.
I got hooked on a fantasy series by somebody I'd never heard of because they made the first book available for $0. "Meh, for free, I'll give it a whirl!" After that I paid full price for the other 5 books.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I'm not sure I agree. All you can eat books is probably 4 or 5 books a month to me, but I know alot of people that will read 1 or 2 in that same period. I'm betting their algorithm takes into account people who read a chapter or two and then dump the book.
In the normal payment model, I bought that book, so I might as well power through. Especially if I'm an avid reader and I am worried about running out of things to read. With this model I can sample a bunch of crappy books and move on until I find a good one at no cost. That would seem to reward good writing and allow the chaff to sink more quickly.
I can see how this would be scary to big name authors who can churn out a bunch of crappy novels that people buy on name recognition. I would be much more likely to take a chance on an author under this system. It sounds like a boon to good writing to me.
Cheap storage VM.
Kindle ebooks account for 19.5% of all ebook sales, ebooks make up 30% of book sales. I'm not sure about the paper book stats, but that's not really what we're talking about here anyway.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/je...
Twenty percent is no monopoly. Not even close. As of a year ago, iTunes accounted for 63% of digital music sales. Are they also a monopoly that must be regulated? They're more than three times the offender that Amazon is with ebooks.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/4...
Amazon wasn't even the first on scene. Sony had e-ink readers and an online store for quite some time. There's also nothing stopping vendors from selling to Kindle users. They wouldn't be able to use DRM, but we're all against DRM here anyway, right? Supply your special Amazon email address that links to your reader, and off you go. Easy cheesy. There are a number of publishers already selling DRM free content, even on Amazon itself. This is what Amazon tried with Apple. They had all DRM free digital music and made it simple to drop their tracks into your iTunes catalog. The door is open for others to do that to Amazon with ebooks.
I don't see your distortion in unrelated fields. All I see is some claims that can't be substantiated from the evidence. You're arguing pre-crime. You want to harm a company for a position they might be in in the future. That's awful. That's not the type of country we live in.