I think it's pretty obvious who picked the right connector: Apple. On laptops, it really doesn't matter, but on desktops, it does. Apple made one connector that carries both your display data and peripheral data. This means that your computer under the table is connected to a monitor on top of the table, and your peripherals fan out from there, on top of the desk, where they are easily accessible.
I can't imagine why Sony felt they had to do things differently. It's bad enough combining eSATA with USB, but combining Thunderbolt with USB means that there are now three different and incompatible types of peripherals that you can hook up to USB ports on certain models of Sony's products. Great way to create customer confusion. Yikes.
Somebody should be beaten over the head with a clue-by-four for that one.
Likewise with FireWire. Sony used a smaller connector because they thought the standard connector was too big. Well, not only is the 4-pin FireWire connector flimsy as heck because of its size, but also it is visually almost indistinguishable at a quick glance from both mini-USB and the power connector used by a lot of manufacturers' camcorders....
Comparing Amazon to YouTube is fundamentally flawed for four reasons:
YouTube doesn't encrypt content on the fly (DRM).
YouTube doesn't generally use https.
YouTube doesn't risk getting sued by a paying customer if a video fails to play.
YouTube tends to have most people watching just a handful of videos. I would not expect the same thing to happen with purchased books, with rare exceptions. Purchases tend not to be driven nearly as much by the "Hey, watch this!" effect.
As for distributed distribution, that can't possibly work if you're relying on smoke-and-mirrors DRM, as everyone would have to be passing around the unencrypted content, or else they would have to all use a single shared key, either of which would make the DRM pathetically trivial to break, and worse, odds are good that folks would also break the encryption on the protocol, at which point their entire collection would become free (as in beer). There are reasons why folks who are selling downloads almost universally prefer centralized control....
Not sure where you got five percent. There's the credit card transaction fee, which is usually about 20-30 cents plus about 3%. Then depending on the size of the book, you have to add the data throughput and the cost of keeping copies continuously accessible on high-availability, high speed storage.
Most folks don't know exactly what the latter costs, and nobody who does know can say, so all I have to go on are rumors and innuendo, which suggest that it's somewhere between twenty and fifty cents to host a 3-5 megabyte download, assuming that it gets a reasonable download rate. So I'm wild-assed guessing based on that, and scaling up to a much larger file size.
The point is that it's not just bandwidth. The data has to be on spinning storage, and that spinning storage has to be continuously online and accessible, with multiple backups continuously online and accessible, with RAID setups, offline backups, hot swap failover servers, backup power generators, backup network links, and if it's a high volume download, you'll also need to factor in the cost of distributing the data via Akamai to lots of local data centers around the world. The data connection is the tip of the iceberg when you're talking about an operation of Amazon's size.
But why exactly is pre-printing thousands of copies a requirement for anybody in this day and age?
It's not, but it is a requirement if you want a quality paper copy that will last for more than a few readings. There are very few print-on-demand hardcover houses, and AFAIK, none of them do traditional hardcover (stitched signature) binding. Instead, they do plain old perfect binding (fold and glue), which means that they are not significantly more robust than a paperback copy. A few of them will do saddle-stapled bindings, but that's really not much better.
Thus, if a paperback is good enough, then there's no need for pre-printed books. If you want the quality and robustness of a hardcover, it's not currently possible with POD to the best of my knowledge.
Also, I'm not aware of any POD houses that will do full color interiors. There might be some, but all the houses I've looked at are limited to black and white interiors with full-color covers. For novels, that doesn't matter. For photo tour books, it's kind of a show stopper.
By definition, the value of a product to a consumer is based on the benefit that the consumer gets from it. Hours of enjoyment is a good metric for that. It's not the only metric, but it's a pretty good one. Nor am I saying that price should necessarily be based on the value to the consumer.
What I'm saying is that when price and perceived value differ radically, as is the case if you price a book that will get you many, many hours of enjoyment at the same $0.99 price as a three minute song, you've probably underpriced yourself so badly that people will assume your product is junk.
BTW, the county fair might give you a whole day of entertainment if you're easily amused or are a kid. For everybody else, it's usually good for an hour or two at best. Thus, the question of its relative value depends a lot on your perspective. More importantly, though, because it is so popular for kids, it has to be priced cheaply, as you have to buy tickets for the entire family, not just one ticket for everybody. That automatically lowers how much you can usefully get for it.
And yes, movies (at least in theaters, and new releases) are way overpriced.
You'll saturate the market, and then you will have no hope of recouping your printing costs because everyone who wants the book will already have given up and bought the electronic edition. I really don't think that will work.
Now what will work is for an author to release his or her first book electronically, then if it does well, release the sequel in print, and simultaneously re-release the first book in print. But a standalone book released electronically first? That sounds like a recipe for going broke.
But vastly less space than it would require to store the printed books in enough quantities. Also, there is no shipping to/from the store required.
Oh, absolutely. Even taking into account the need for lots of servers distributed around the world for availability and performance reasons, it still costs a lot less than print. My best guess is somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty or sixty cents per transaction for a large company like Amazon after you factor in the credit card fees, network bandwidth, server costs, facilities, maintenance, etc.
That's assuming files on the order of 0-5 megabytes and priced at a dollar. The costs go up as the size and/or price go up, so for a ten dollar book, it's more like a buck ten, and for a $100 math textbook that's 200 megabytes in size because of all the figures, it's probably at least six or seven dollars, and maybe as high as fifteen.
CGI also costs a lot. Whether you like it or not, movies with good effects (even those that are pretty much all special effects) are popular. Advertising is important too.
I was deliberately ignoring special effects movies. You're right, of course, but that affects a fairly small percentage of movies to any significant degree. (Admittedly, the highest grossing movies, but still....) More importantly, those costs are fairly directly reflected in the price of the product when compared with movies that don't have lots of SFX. Those aren't usually $5–10 movies until they've been out for a decade or more, and thus aren't really in the same price class as books unless you're buying a hardcover at full retail price right after its release.
No, I was specifically talking about already-successful writers; they're the publishing industry's cash cows, and without them all those New York offices will be rather hard to pay for.
Maybe, but they're also the ones who demand higher royalties, more travel expenses, more advertising expenses, etc. They're a safe bet, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the industry can't do well without them.
In a way, this is a bit of an "adapt or die" moment for the publishing industry, precisely because they've been too hesitant to take on new talent in the past (because of the cost of print). They're going to have to do more new author acquisitions, as that's the only way they will continue to remain useful and viable.
That said, in a way, I think that publishers also see electronic publishing as a great way of doing just that. By accepting more new authors and taking advantage of electronic publishing and print-on-demand services (but under their imprint), they can maintain smaller inventories (thus mitigating the costs of accepting more works) while still providing a useful filtering service. Thus, I see the long-term role of publishers as more of a highly selective advertising and finishing service... and in a way, this is what they have always done.
So, you are saying that a book costs as much to write and print (or upload to a server) that it is on the same level with the costs associated with running a cinema?
You're comparing apples and oranges. The cinema's costs are channel costs, which are directly comparable to the percentage that book resellers charge (e.g. Amazon selling an eBook to a reader). Those costs aren't as small as you think.
For a $1.00 eBook, VISA takes about 25–30 cents as a transaction fee, plus 2–3 percent, so almost a third of that goes directly to the credit card processor. This becomes a bigger and bigger problem as the size of the transaction gets smaller. For a $10 eBook, the processing fee ends up being around 6%. For a $0.50 eBook, the processing fee is about 63%
Similarly, servers require power and take up space. A lot of space. Amazon as of two years ago was estimated to have somewhere around 40,000 servers. That's on the order of 35 gigawatt hours of power consumption on the low side, which even at a low rate of ten cents per kWh is still $3.5 million dollars annually—not exactly chump change. And that's not counting leasing building space, network connections, paying administrators to fix things when they break, and so on. Yes, it's divided up among a lot of transactions, but it's still a huge infrastructure cost, and more importantly, most of those costs scale roughly linearly according to peak demand, so you don't get a huge cost savings by increasing volume.
The cost to upload the book, by contrast, is negligible, as is the cost of making the actual print and mailing it to a movie theater. That's so small that it gets lost in the noise.
BTW, movies cost so much to make almost entirely due to advertising costs. You can make a great movie on HDV or similar for a few thousand in gear, a couple hundred bucks in tapes, plus ten or fifteen bucks an hour to hire talent from your local college drama department. What the multi-million dollar talent contracts bring in is not better quality, but rather name recognition and the automatic crowd appeal that comes from that recognition. In other words, advertising.
Don't make the mistake of conflating that high production cost with any inherent costs of the production itself. Book advertising could be just as expensive if you wanted it to be. The only reason no company does this is that book publishers sell a much smaller number of units on average, and thus can't distribute such exorbitant advertising costs across enough units to keep the price per unit from being ridiculous. The point is that most of those do not directly contribute to the quality of workmanship; thus, although they may contribute to the cost of a work, they should not contribute to its perceived value.
And even so, the money they get paid while working eventually runs out.
Nobody is arguing about that. It doesn't, however, stop simply because the person died, and that was my point. It stops when the specified amount is paid out. In much the same way, copyright should end when the specified number of years has expired, without regard to when the person dies.
Yes. And it's such a shame if it doesn't sell well. Too bad. I think it's worthless to pay people who created nothing (the family).
Whether a work sells or not has no bearing on this discussion whatsoever. That risk is a natural risk based on the quality of the product, which is largely under the author's control. The risk that the value of the work becomes zero on the day of the author's death is an artificial risk based on something outside the author's control. That's a pretty big difference.
Which creation? How many people can honestly say that they wouldn't create anything if it wasn't 100% guaranteed that their loved ones would continue to get paid after they died?
No, you have it backwards. The question is how many people can honestly say they would bother to create something if it was 100% guaranteed that their loved ones would get nothing after they died? And that answer depends largely on how long the person thinks he or she has to live. Someone given a year to live will only write memoirs if that person is exceptionally vain or if his or her family will benefit. So there's one pretty clear case where it affects whether a work gets created or not, and arguably a fairly important one in light of this week's events.
Either way, you're still failing to come to grips with or in any way refute the core of my argument, which is that the author agrees to take payment later, and you're arguing that the author should lose that payment simply because he or she died. That just doesn't make sense in any sane universe.
Further, it makes even less sense because corporations don't die, which means that authors will be able to completely dodge it (for a small percentage) by writing it as a work for hire, and getting paid on the back end. Therefore, in practice, your scheme will have no effect on copyright duration whatsoever. The only real effect will be the addition of additional layers of corporate bloat to the creative process and the relegation of copyright to being almost the exclusive domain of the megacorps. That's hardly a win in anybody's book.
Interesting way to ward off criticism. "You're not in my situation. Therefore, all of your criticisms are invalid!" It's about as effective on me as the, "Well, let's see you do better!" argument.
I argued out of logic and fairness, with lots of justification along the way. Your answer, by contrast, completely ignored my points, and merely repeated your opinion, providing no justification whatsoever for that opinion. Repeating an opinion over and over does not make it more right. It just makes it more tedious. My response was merely a reflection of the resulting exasperation.
And self-published authors use print-on-demand, which means that they don't have the sunk cost of printing. You're talking about different authors with different requirements here, so of course they price things differently....
Back in the real world, publishers hate ebooks because once successful authors realise they can make more money by self-publishing an ebook for $4.99 than they do from selling a hardback through a publisher, they'll abandon publishing in droves.
Replying again because I forgot to address this point. I think you're failing to note that this only applies to already-successful authors. They can make more money selling electronic versions because they are already famous. People are already paying to seek out their stuff. They could publish on toilet tissue and people would buy it.
What the pulp media provides is a very valuable filter for discovering new authors that don't suck. If I have to look through a hundred first chapters of books before concluding that they are poorly written crap (or worse, don't conclude it until I've already paid for it and gotten a quarter of the way through without discovering much of a plot), then you've just wasted my time. There's an actual financial value in being able to have somebody else do that for me.
Case in point, I recently stumbled across a series of books at Border's during their 50% off store closing sale. I bought what turned out to be all but one of the series, knowing nothing about the author, and having done nothing but read the short snippet from the inside of the front cover on a couple of them. I felt comfortable doing that because I knew there was no way a really bad writer could possibly get seven books published through a major publishing house.
The publishers provide one consistent voice, one relatively consistent opinion on what is and is not good writing, and although I'm sure I could find lots of good writing that isn't published through a major publishing house, I know that everything that does get published through those channels meets at least a certain minimum quality standard.
You don't get that with eBooks. Even to the extent that Amazon and other services provide product reviews, the reviews are all over the map, even for books and movies that I enjoy. Really, what you need is a way of asking Amazon to show me reviews written by people whose reviews on products have been similar to my reviews, and who have purchased similar types of products. And even then, it won't be as good as having a consistent set of reviewers whose opinions you trust.
In short, for new authors, there will always be a major advantage to getting published through a properly refereed channel. And although it is largely unimportant whether that channel is a major print publisher or some other entity, for now, those print publishers exist and fill that need.
Nobody said it should cost three times what the paperback costs. I said it made sense for it to cost a bit more.
Besides, as I've said previously, those eBook sales also take money away from the paper sales, which, being a sunk cost, must be made up for. Electronic sales don't take away the costs of the printed copy; they compound it.
Weird, because plenty of self-published ebook authors also sell print versions of their books. They don't care whether you buy a $15 print book or a $5 ebook because they make about the same amount of money either way.
Self-published eBook authors also mostly use print-on-demand services, which means that they don't have the cost of printing hanging over their heads as a sunk cost. I'm talking about anyone considering doing traditional print publishing, not POD.
But authors don't have to _LIVE_ in Silicon Valley. They can live in a much cheaper place where they don't need to make $150,000 a year to have a half-decent life.
Not my point. The point was that even if the author lives in a place where a programmer would make $60,000 per year, the author would need to make around $100,000 to make the same amount of money. Nothing more, nothing less.
That's because the 'average author' 'sells' a short story to a magazine every other year and the magazine only gives them a few free copies as payment. By that standard, the 'average programmer' grossed almost nothing after the dot-com crash when they were unemployed.
I'm talking about the average novel author's income. You're broadening the scope a lot more.... And the average programmer wasn't unemployed. At the peak of the crash, the Silicon Valley still had a lower unemployment rate than it does now, which while nearly double the national average at the time, was still only around nine percent.
And being able to receive money while they're alive (for a time) isn't enough for them? As far as I know, most jobs don't continue to pay the family years after the employee is already dead.
That's completely orthogonal. Most jobs pay the person while they are working. Authorship doesn't. It starts paying off after the work is finished, and spreads that payment out over a period of time.
The payoff from that copyright is not equivalent to paying someone a salary after he or she dies. It's equivalent to back pay that the company owes that person for having agreed to a temporary suspension of pay to help the company get by during difficult times. The death of the recipient does not negate the fact that the money is owed. It is repayment of a debt, pure and simple.
I don't think this is encouraging creation at all.
As someone who has done this, I can tell you that the copyright most certainly did encourage that creation, and continues to do so.
What creative works have you produced without any prepayment, with the intent to sell them? When you toil for a year on a work of art or literature in the hopes that someday you'll be able to sell it and make money off of it, then we can talk. Until then, your view of whether that copyright guarantee encourages creation or not is as utterly meaningless as an Ayn Rand novel.
I notice that many publishers still insist on charging MORE for the e-book than for the paperback, despite the fact that the e-book can't be loaned out or resold. No wonder people are angry at them.
Publishers charge more for the electronic versions under the assumption that they are more likely to be pirated (in spite of any DRM), and thus reduce sales. Whether this is or is not a legitimate concern is debatable, but it's certainly understandable.
Further, it makes no sense to price the electronic edition of a book cheaper than the paper copies. Those print copies are a sunk cost that needs to be recovered, and setting a cheaper copy on the electronic edition would cannibalize those crucial sales, causing more of those copies to be remaindered at a loss. Thus, the only way a publisher can guarantee that they won't lose money is to charge as much for the electronic copy as the printing cost of the print copy plus the author's royalty plus the channel cost for the electronic copy plus their normal profit for a print copy. There's a good chance that when you total that up, it ends up being more than the cost of a print copy.
If you wind up having to work a day job too, cry me a river, build a bridge and GET OVER IT.
Most of us do. The question is not whether an author should have a second job; that's almost inevitable. The question is whether the time spent writing even provides enough payback to be worth doing at all. Given that an average eBook reportedly sells about 10,000 copies, at a buck apiece, you'll earn about $3,300 in royalties, or about half the average advance on a printed book. It's peanuts.
So you'd put in the equivalent of 9–12 months of full-time work—say 1,500–2,000 hours—and make $3,300, or about $1.65–2.20 per hour. You'd make more money as an illegal immigrant doing yard work for cash under the table. You'd be so far down on the pay scale that there are people working at factories in third world countries that would make almost as much money as you do. To suggest that authors should sell their works for so little money is downright patronizing.
Also, if you're a programmer making only $60,000 in any major city, you're underpaid by at least a factor of 1.5, and as you said, if that's your total compensation, you're underpaid by a lot more than that.
Once you factor in health insurance, 401k matching, Medicare and SSI/SDI, leasing a building, maintaining that building, electricity, I'm told that an average engineer costs a company on the order of $250–300,000 per year, at least in the Silicon Valley. Admittedly, most authors don't lease an office, but an author still has to pay for much of that himself or herself, which means that an author would need to gross well over $150,000 to make as much money as a Silicon Valley programmer.
In reality, the average author grosses almost nothing; the average novel sells only about 500 copies annually, and only about 6,000 over its lifetime, which is why nearly all authors these days are doing their writing in addition to their regular job. You're lucky if you can make ten grand a year as an author, which is not enough to live on.
The average author (even through major publishers) makes only single-digit thousands of dollars per title. Most titles are lucky to sell a few thousand copies.
One might argue that a $0.99 model might make your product more likely to be an impulse buy even if you have no intention of reading it, but that's the only way such a low price point will drive sales up, and maybe not even then. Odds are, you'll still sell only a few thousand copies, only now you'll make $0.30 each instead of a buck or two. It seems obvious that without a MUCH better division of profits between the author and the distributor, authors cannot make a living selling eBooks at $0.99. Any argument to the contrary, being an extraordinary claim, thus demands extraordinary proof.
There's also the problem that this ignores all the psychology involved in setting prices. In the absence of some reason to buy a specific book, if the majority of folks sell eBooks at $0.99, your best bet for high sales is to sell yours at $1.29, not $0.79. By setting a higher price, you are actually more likely to get sales because people will look at it and say, "This author thinks that his/her work is better than the rest of the stuff on the market." This will tend to drive prices back up as soon as somebody tries a $0.99 pricing model, and more to the point, will seriously diminish (if not eliminate) any additional sales that an author would otherwise have gotten from pricing his or her books at a disposable $0.99 price because it will seem so much cheaper than other books on the market.
I would actually argue that books are currently way underpriced. A new release of a movie gives you two hours of enjoyment for $20. A new release of a hardcover book gives you significantly more than two hours of enjoyment for that same $20 unless you're speed reading (and probably even then). Based on that, an eBook at $0.99 would be absurdly underpriced, which would cause anyone who looked at it to assume that it must be crap to be priced at such a deep discount. No one wants a book that the author thinks is worth only as much as a three minute music download. If you calculate the price of a book based on the amount of time it takes to write, edit, and format a book compared with the time it takes to write, record, and edit a song, a good novel should cost a couple hundred dollars. It's way, way, way more work. You can certainly use that as an argument that music is massively overpriced (and you'll get no disagreement from me), but as a seller, you have to work within the market as it exists, not as you think it should be.
Finally, there's the rather fundamental problem that an eBook that dramatically undercuts the price of the printed page will tend to cut the knees out from under your print sales. No publisher will be willing to do this, and no author who has any intention of ever releasing a print edition will do this, either. The cost of printing makes selling a paper copy at or near the $1 mark utterly impractical. Thus, by setting an eBook price that does not take into account the cost of other media, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
We can debate on the length of copyright, but one thing is sure, copyright should never extend beyond the death of the author/artist/musician/etc...
As someone who makes a living off of creative works, I strongly disagree. Say that you have an author who writes an incredible book. He or she dies a week after its publication. Under your scheme, the author's family gets one week's revenue even though the author put in five years of his or her life to create the book in question. That's hardly reasonable.
What you're failing to take into account is that unlike other occupations, unless an author, painter, sculptor, composer, or performer is working for a corporate overlord, he or she gets paid over time as the product sells. That means that he or she has spent years creating something that will help support his or her family afterwards. The incentive to create is based on the promise that the creation will be worth something to his or her family going forward, and it is that promise that encourages authors to accept that delayed payback. If you change the law so that the delayed payback won't happen at all if you die too soon, you're encouraging people to limit themselves to jobs that pay you as you go along, and thus significantly reducing the incentive to create.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to create creative works. It's unimportant whether copyright will continue to encourage a particular author to create new works. The promise that the new work would pay to feed his or her family after its creation was what encouraged the author to create the existing work. Therefore, it should not matter whether the author is alive or dead; the author's kids or other beneficiaries should have the right to that income.
Further, your scheme could encourage less reputable publishers to off their authors so that they don't have to keep paying royalties.:-)
I'm strongly of the opinion that copyright terms should be for a period of 14 years, renewable by the author or his/her descendants for 14 more. The author's death should have no part in the copyright term whatsoever.
You can legitimately argue that extending copyright beyond some point ceases to be a motivator for the creative process, but cutting off copyright at ten years is basically cutting the knees out from under book authors. Indeed, if you're even asking about people who have been dead for hundreds of years, you completely missed my point. I'm not talking about somebody digging up something written fifty or a hundred years ago and thinking, "I'd like to make a movie version of this." I'm talking about the fact that with the relatively rare exception of books and movies written simultaneously (pre-greenlit movies), it normally takes more than ten years to go from "Hey, this book got published" to "Hey, this movie got released":
3-5 years from initial publication of a new author's work before enough people have read the book to get the attention of a movie studio.
4-6 years for pitching the idea to the studio, writing the screenplay, designing sets, casting, filming, and post-production.
1-2 years of theater exclusivity.
a few months of pay-per-view exclusivity.
1-2 years of DVD exclusivity.
TV airings.
So even in the best case, the movie company would be barely halfway through their release process when they stopped owing the author a penny. Drag their heels another two years, and they'll still be able to easily leech off of the author's success without having to give anything back. That's just not right.
In effect, limiting copyright to ten years would ensure that only three types of people continue to write:
People working for a corporation on salary.
People who are already rich and can afford to not make money off their work.
People who write pulp fiction designed for immediate commercial gain.
If ever there were a way to guarantee that the quality of creative works will go into the toilet, a 10 year maximum copyright duration is it. That's just absurdly too short for any sort of literary work, and anyone who thinks otherwise has clearly not thought through the effects of such a change.
I'm going to suggest that everyone in here is forgetting about secondary rights. A masterpiece book makes a lot of money in the first few years. Ten years later, somebody gets around to making a movie version. The author of the original book deserves to get royalties from that. It isn't fair to allow freeloading by a major industry off the hard work of an individual, as would be the case if copyright durations were so absurdly short.
Copyright durations should be 14 years, with the option to extend for a second 14. Anything shorter and content creators will be exploited by big corporations. You know, as in, "Why would I pay you royalties for your story when I can just keep that submission instead of shredding it, and publish it in ten years for free?"
When you have websites like Facebook that, by default, use unencrypted HTTP and a trivially sniffable session cookie for their authentication, there's really nothing a user can do to protect themselves. (Okay, now they offer HTTPS, but that wasn't always the case.)
The problem with HTTPS, of course, is that it is seriously heavyweight. Most content doesn't need encryption; it just needs authentication. For those sites, SSL is serious overkill.
What this really points out is the desperate need for a standard mechanism of authentication that is not based on cookies, but rather nonce-based, similar to the way digest authentication works, but integrated with web pages so it doesn't feel ugly and bolted on. Until we get that, there's really no point in users bothering to secure their accounts. Why choose a strong password when you're basically sending it back and forth on the Internet equivalent of a postcard?
In my original post, everywhere I said "lux", I should have said "average indoor lux", i.e. if a window is of a size that it provides an average of 100 lux illumination indoors. It was not intended to suggest that the sun provides only 100 lux.
You're talking about 1,000-10,000 lux outdoors. In places where you have solid glass (e.g. IL1 at Apple), sure, cutting out 80% of the light probably wouldn't be a show stopper. In a typical home, however, the amount of light that comes inside is a small fraction of that even with clear windows because you neither have a glass ceiling nor solid glass walls.
Recall that perceived brightness is lux per square foot. Outdoors, 1,000 lux seems bright because it is shining on everything. Now shine it on only a few square feet of a room near the window. The rest of the room has only reflected light. Even for a 12x12x8 room with an 8x6 window, the sun is covering only fifty or sixty square feet of floor out of a 144 square foot floor, or well under half the floor. By the time you reflect this around the entire room, you're probably getting only a few percent of the exterior illumination unless your building is all glass and/or mirrors. You're talking about adding another 80-90% cut on top of that. This means you will almost certainly have to use lighting during the day where you otherwise would not have.
I live in a house with lots of (nearly clear) windows (covering almost half of each exterior wall, plus some skylights). Even with the shades open, in full sun, the lighting indoors is only adequate, not bright by any means. If I cut 90% of that light out, it would be nowhere near adequate even in full sun.
If cutting out 80% of the light were a good idea, I would expect buildings to be doing this frequently. By contrast, if anything, the trend for the past decade has been to increase the number of windows and skylights to bring in more natural light, not less, because 40% of an average commercial building's electrical costs come from lighting alone. (Source: Velux)
Or you're financially getting started. There's no need to be an elitist.
Yeah, but if you're so financially neophytic that you don't have enough cash in the bank to cover one month's expenses, you'd have to be pretty much a complete idiot to get a mortgage, and a bank would have to be doubly so to give you one. Just saying.
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I think it's pretty obvious who picked the right connector: Apple. On laptops, it really doesn't matter, but on desktops, it does. Apple made one connector that carries both your display data and peripheral data. This means that your computer under the table is connected to a monitor on top of the table, and your peripherals fan out from there, on top of the desk, where they are easily accessible.
I can't imagine why Sony felt they had to do things differently. It's bad enough combining eSATA with USB, but combining Thunderbolt with USB means that there are now three different and incompatible types of peripherals that you can hook up to USB ports on certain models of Sony's products. Great way to create customer confusion. Yikes.
Somebody should be beaten over the head with a clue-by-four for that one.
Likewise with FireWire. Sony used a smaller connector because they thought the standard connector was too big. Well, not only is the 4-pin FireWire connector flimsy as heck because of its size, but also it is visually almost indistinguishable at a quick glance from both mini-USB and the power connector used by a lot of manufacturers' camcorders....
Comparing Amazon to YouTube is fundamentally flawed for four reasons:
As for distributed distribution, that can't possibly work if you're relying on smoke-and-mirrors DRM, as everyone would have to be passing around the unencrypted content, or else they would have to all use a single shared key, either of which would make the DRM pathetically trivial to break, and worse, odds are good that folks would also break the encryption on the protocol, at which point their entire collection would become free (as in beer). There are reasons why folks who are selling downloads almost universally prefer centralized control....
Not sure where you got five percent. There's the credit card transaction fee, which is usually about 20-30 cents plus about 3%. Then depending on the size of the book, you have to add the data throughput and the cost of keeping copies continuously accessible on high-availability, high speed storage.
Most folks don't know exactly what the latter costs, and nobody who does know can say, so all I have to go on are rumors and innuendo, which suggest that it's somewhere between twenty and fifty cents to host a 3-5 megabyte download, assuming that it gets a reasonable download rate. So I'm wild-assed guessing based on that, and scaling up to a much larger file size.
The point is that it's not just bandwidth. The data has to be on spinning storage, and that spinning storage has to be continuously online and accessible, with multiple backups continuously online and accessible, with RAID setups, offline backups, hot swap failover servers, backup power generators, backup network links, and if it's a high volume download, you'll also need to factor in the cost of distributing the data via Akamai to lots of local data centers around the world. The data connection is the tip of the iceberg when you're talking about an operation of Amazon's size.
It's not, but it is a requirement if you want a quality paper copy that will last for more than a few readings. There are very few print-on-demand hardcover houses, and AFAIK, none of them do traditional hardcover (stitched signature) binding. Instead, they do plain old perfect binding (fold and glue), which means that they are not significantly more robust than a paperback copy. A few of them will do saddle-stapled bindings, but that's really not much better.
Thus, if a paperback is good enough, then there's no need for pre-printed books. If you want the quality and robustness of a hardcover, it's not currently possible with POD to the best of my knowledge.
Also, I'm not aware of any POD houses that will do full color interiors. There might be some, but all the houses I've looked at are limited to black and white interiors with full-color covers. For novels, that doesn't matter. For photo tour books, it's kind of a show stopper.
By definition, the value of a product to a consumer is based on the benefit that the consumer gets from it. Hours of enjoyment is a good metric for that. It's not the only metric, but it's a pretty good one. Nor am I saying that price should necessarily be based on the value to the consumer.
What I'm saying is that when price and perceived value differ radically, as is the case if you price a book that will get you many, many hours of enjoyment at the same $0.99 price as a three minute song, you've probably underpriced yourself so badly that people will assume your product is junk.
BTW, the county fair might give you a whole day of entertainment if you're easily amused or are a kid. For everybody else, it's usually good for an hour or two at best. Thus, the question of its relative value depends a lot on your perspective. More importantly, though, because it is so popular for kids, it has to be priced cheaply, as you have to buy tickets for the entire family, not just one ticket for everybody. That automatically lowers how much you can usefully get for it.
And yes, movies (at least in theaters, and new releases) are way overpriced.
You'll saturate the market, and then you will have no hope of recouping your printing costs because everyone who wants the book will already have given up and bought the electronic edition. I really don't think that will work.
Now what will work is for an author to release his or her first book electronically, then if it does well, release the sequel in print, and simultaneously re-release the first book in print. But a standalone book released electronically first? That sounds like a recipe for going broke.
Oh, absolutely. Even taking into account the need for lots of servers distributed around the world for availability and performance reasons, it still costs a lot less than print. My best guess is somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty or sixty cents per transaction for a large company like Amazon after you factor in the credit card fees, network bandwidth, server costs, facilities, maintenance, etc.
That's assuming files on the order of 0-5 megabytes and priced at a dollar. The costs go up as the size and/or price go up, so for a ten dollar book, it's more like a buck ten, and for a $100 math textbook that's 200 megabytes in size because of all the figures, it's probably at least six or seven dollars, and maybe as high as fifteen.
I was deliberately ignoring special effects movies. You're right, of course, but that affects a fairly small percentage of movies to any significant degree. (Admittedly, the highest grossing movies, but still....) More importantly, those costs are fairly directly reflected in the price of the product when compared with movies that don't have lots of SFX. Those aren't usually $5–10 movies until they've been out for a decade or more, and thus aren't really in the same price class as books unless you're buying a hardcover at full retail price right after its release.
Maybe, but they're also the ones who demand higher royalties, more travel expenses, more advertising expenses, etc. They're a safe bet, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the industry can't do well without them.
In a way, this is a bit of an "adapt or die" moment for the publishing industry, precisely because they've been too hesitant to take on new talent in the past (because of the cost of print). They're going to have to do more new author acquisitions, as that's the only way they will continue to remain useful and viable.
That said, in a way, I think that publishers also see electronic publishing as a great way of doing just that. By accepting more new authors and taking advantage of electronic publishing and print-on-demand services (but under their imprint), they can maintain smaller inventories (thus mitigating the costs of accepting more works) while still providing a useful filtering service. Thus, I see the long-term role of publishers as more of a highly selective advertising and finishing service... and in a way, this is what they have always done.
You're comparing apples and oranges. The cinema's costs are channel costs, which are directly comparable to the percentage that book resellers charge (e.g. Amazon selling an eBook to a reader). Those costs aren't as small as you think.
For a $1.00 eBook, VISA takes about 25–30 cents as a transaction fee, plus 2–3 percent, so almost a third of that goes directly to the credit card processor. This becomes a bigger and bigger problem as the size of the transaction gets smaller. For a $10 eBook, the processing fee ends up being around 6%. For a $0.50 eBook, the processing fee is about 63%
Similarly, servers require power and take up space. A lot of space. Amazon as of two years ago was estimated to have somewhere around 40,000 servers. That's on the order of 35 gigawatt hours of power consumption on the low side, which even at a low rate of ten cents per kWh is still $3.5 million dollars annually—not exactly chump change. And that's not counting leasing building space, network connections, paying administrators to fix things when they break, and so on. Yes, it's divided up among a lot of transactions, but it's still a huge infrastructure cost, and more importantly, most of those costs scale roughly linearly according to peak demand, so you don't get a huge cost savings by increasing volume.
The cost to upload the book, by contrast, is negligible, as is the cost of making the actual print and mailing it to a movie theater. That's so small that it gets lost in the noise.
BTW, movies cost so much to make almost entirely due to advertising costs. You can make a great movie on HDV or similar for a few thousand in gear, a couple hundred bucks in tapes, plus ten or fifteen bucks an hour to hire talent from your local college drama department. What the multi-million dollar talent contracts bring in is not better quality, but rather name recognition and the automatic crowd appeal that comes from that recognition. In other words, advertising.
Don't make the mistake of conflating that high production cost with any inherent costs of the production itself. Book advertising could be just as expensive if you wanted it to be. The only reason no company does this is that book publishers sell a much smaller number of units on average, and thus can't distribute such exorbitant advertising costs across enough units to keep the price per unit from being ridiculous. The point is that most of those do not directly contribute to the quality of workmanship; thus, although they may contribute to the cost of a work, they should not contribute to its perceived value.
Nobody is arguing about that. It doesn't, however, stop simply because the person died, and that was my point. It stops when the specified amount is paid out. In much the same way, copyright should end when the specified number of years has expired, without regard to when the person dies.
Whether a work sells or not has no bearing on this discussion whatsoever. That risk is a natural risk based on the quality of the product, which is largely under the author's control. The risk that the value of the work becomes zero on the day of the author's death is an artificial risk based on something outside the author's control. That's a pretty big difference.
No, you have it backwards. The question is how many people can honestly say they would bother to create something if it was 100% guaranteed that their loved ones would get nothing after they died? And that answer depends largely on how long the person thinks he or she has to live. Someone given a year to live will only write memoirs if that person is exceptionally vain or if his or her family will benefit. So there's one pretty clear case where it affects whether a work gets created or not, and arguably a fairly important one in light of this week's events.
Either way, you're still failing to come to grips with or in any way refute the core of my argument, which is that the author agrees to take payment later, and you're arguing that the author should lose that payment simply because he or she died. That just doesn't make sense in any sane universe.
Further, it makes even less sense because corporations don't die, which means that authors will be able to completely dodge it (for a small percentage) by writing it as a work for hire, and getting paid on the back end. Therefore, in practice, your scheme will have no effect on copyright duration whatsoever. The only real effect will be the addition of additional layers of corporate bloat to the creative process and the relegation of copyright to being almost the exclusive domain of the megacorps. That's hardly a win in anybody's book.
I argued out of logic and fairness, with lots of justification along the way. Your answer, by contrast, completely ignored my points, and merely repeated your opinion, providing no justification whatsoever for that opinion. Repeating an opinion over and over does not make it more right. It just makes it more tedious. My response was merely a reflection of the resulting exasperation.
And self-published authors use print-on-demand, which means that they don't have the sunk cost of printing. You're talking about different authors with different requirements here, so of course they price things differently....
Replying again because I forgot to address this point. I think you're failing to note that this only applies to already-successful authors. They can make more money selling electronic versions because they are already famous. People are already paying to seek out their stuff. They could publish on toilet tissue and people would buy it.
What the pulp media provides is a very valuable filter for discovering new authors that don't suck. If I have to look through a hundred first chapters of books before concluding that they are poorly written crap (or worse, don't conclude it until I've already paid for it and gotten a quarter of the way through without discovering much of a plot), then you've just wasted my time. There's an actual financial value in being able to have somebody else do that for me.
Case in point, I recently stumbled across a series of books at Border's during their 50% off store closing sale. I bought what turned out to be all but one of the series, knowing nothing about the author, and having done nothing but read the short snippet from the inside of the front cover on a couple of them. I felt comfortable doing that because I knew there was no way a really bad writer could possibly get seven books published through a major publishing house.
The publishers provide one consistent voice, one relatively consistent opinion on what is and is not good writing, and although I'm sure I could find lots of good writing that isn't published through a major publishing house, I know that everything that does get published through those channels meets at least a certain minimum quality standard.
You don't get that with eBooks. Even to the extent that Amazon and other services provide product reviews, the reviews are all over the map, even for books and movies that I enjoy. Really, what you need is a way of asking Amazon to show me reviews written by people whose reviews on products have been similar to my reviews, and who have purchased similar types of products. And even then, it won't be as good as having a consistent set of reviewers whose opinions you trust.
In short, for new authors, there will always be a major advantage to getting published through a properly refereed channel. And although it is largely unimportant whether that channel is a major print publisher or some other entity, for now, those print publishers exist and fill that need.
Nobody said it should cost three times what the paperback costs. I said it made sense for it to cost a bit more.
Besides, as I've said previously, those eBook sales also take money away from the paper sales, which, being a sunk cost, must be made up for. Electronic sales don't take away the costs of the printed copy; they compound it.
Self-published eBook authors also mostly use print-on-demand services, which means that they don't have the cost of printing hanging over their heads as a sunk cost. I'm talking about anyone considering doing traditional print publishing, not POD.
Not my point. The point was that even if the author lives in a place where a programmer would make $60,000 per year, the author would need to make around $100,000 to make the same amount of money. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'm talking about the average novel author's income. You're broadening the scope a lot more.... And the average programmer wasn't unemployed. At the peak of the crash, the Silicon Valley still had a lower unemployment rate than it does now, which while nearly double the national average at the time, was still only around nine percent.
That's completely orthogonal. Most jobs pay the person while they are working. Authorship doesn't. It starts paying off after the work is finished, and spreads that payment out over a period of time.
The payoff from that copyright is not equivalent to paying someone a salary after he or she dies. It's equivalent to back pay that the company owes that person for having agreed to a temporary suspension of pay to help the company get by during difficult times. The death of the recipient does not negate the fact that the money is owed. It is repayment of a debt, pure and simple.
As someone who has done this, I can tell you that the copyright most certainly did encourage that creation, and continues to do so.
What creative works have you produced without any prepayment, with the intent to sell them? When you toil for a year on a work of art or literature in the hopes that someday you'll be able to sell it and make money off of it, then we can talk. Until then, your view of whether that copyright guarantee encourages creation or not is as utterly meaningless as an Ayn Rand novel.
Publishers charge more for the electronic versions under the assumption that they are more likely to be pirated (in spite of any DRM), and thus reduce sales. Whether this is or is not a legitimate concern is debatable, but it's certainly understandable.
Further, it makes no sense to price the electronic edition of a book cheaper than the paper copies. Those print copies are a sunk cost that needs to be recovered, and setting a cheaper copy on the electronic edition would cannibalize those crucial sales, causing more of those copies to be remaindered at a loss. Thus, the only way a publisher can guarantee that they won't lose money is to charge as much for the electronic copy as the printing cost of the print copy plus the author's royalty plus the channel cost for the electronic copy plus their normal profit for a print copy. There's a good chance that when you total that up, it ends up being more than the cost of a print copy.
Most of us do. The question is not whether an author should have a second job; that's almost inevitable. The question is whether the time spent writing even provides enough payback to be worth doing at all. Given that an average eBook reportedly sells about 10,000 copies, at a buck apiece, you'll earn about $3,300 in royalties, or about half the average advance on a printed book. It's peanuts.
So you'd put in the equivalent of 9–12 months of full-time work—say 1,500–2,000 hours—and make $3,300, or about $1.65–2.20 per hour. You'd make more money as an illegal immigrant doing yard work for cash under the table. You'd be so far down on the pay scale that there are people working at factories in third world countries that would make almost as much money as you do. To suggest that authors should sell their works for so little money is downright patronizing.
Also, if you're a programmer making only $60,000 in any major city, you're underpaid by at least a factor of 1.5, and as you said, if that's your total compensation, you're underpaid by a lot more than that.
Once you factor in health insurance, 401k matching, Medicare and SSI/SDI, leasing a building, maintaining that building, electricity, I'm told that an average engineer costs a company on the order of $250–300,000 per year, at least in the Silicon Valley. Admittedly, most authors don't lease an office, but an author still has to pay for much of that himself or herself, which means that an author would need to gross well over $150,000 to make as much money as a Silicon Valley programmer.
In reality, the average author grosses almost nothing; the average novel sells only about 500 copies annually, and only about 6,000 over its lifetime, which is why nearly all authors these days are doing their writing in addition to their regular job. You're lucky if you can make ten grand a year as an author, which is not enough to live on.
The average author (even through major publishers) makes only single-digit thousands of dollars per title. Most titles are lucky to sell a few thousand copies.
One might argue that a $0.99 model might make your product more likely to be an impulse buy even if you have no intention of reading it, but that's the only way such a low price point will drive sales up, and maybe not even then. Odds are, you'll still sell only a few thousand copies, only now you'll make $0.30 each instead of a buck or two. It seems obvious that without a MUCH better division of profits between the author and the distributor, authors cannot make a living selling eBooks at $0.99. Any argument to the contrary, being an extraordinary claim, thus demands extraordinary proof.
There's also the problem that this ignores all the psychology involved in setting prices. In the absence of some reason to buy a specific book, if the majority of folks sell eBooks at $0.99, your best bet for high sales is to sell yours at $1.29, not $0.79. By setting a higher price, you are actually more likely to get sales because people will look at it and say, "This author thinks that his/her work is better than the rest of the stuff on the market." This will tend to drive prices back up as soon as somebody tries a $0.99 pricing model, and more to the point, will seriously diminish (if not eliminate) any additional sales that an author would otherwise have gotten from pricing his or her books at a disposable $0.99 price because it will seem so much cheaper than other books on the market.
I would actually argue that books are currently way underpriced. A new release of a movie gives you two hours of enjoyment for $20. A new release of a hardcover book gives you significantly more than two hours of enjoyment for that same $20 unless you're speed reading (and probably even then). Based on that, an eBook at $0.99 would be absurdly underpriced, which would cause anyone who looked at it to assume that it must be crap to be priced at such a deep discount. No one wants a book that the author thinks is worth only as much as a three minute music download. If you calculate the price of a book based on the amount of time it takes to write, edit, and format a book compared with the time it takes to write, record, and edit a song, a good novel should cost a couple hundred dollars. It's way, way, way more work. You can certainly use that as an argument that music is massively overpriced (and you'll get no disagreement from me), but as a seller, you have to work within the market as it exists, not as you think it should be.
Finally, there's the rather fundamental problem that an eBook that dramatically undercuts the price of the printed page will tend to cut the knees out from under your print sales. No publisher will be willing to do this, and no author who has any intention of ever releasing a print edition will do this, either. The cost of printing makes selling a paper copy at or near the $1 mark utterly impractical. Thus, by setting an eBook price that does not take into account the cost of other media, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
As someone who makes a living off of creative works, I strongly disagree. Say that you have an author who writes an incredible book. He or she dies a week after its publication. Under your scheme, the author's family gets one week's revenue even though the author put in five years of his or her life to create the book in question. That's hardly reasonable.
What you're failing to take into account is that unlike other occupations, unless an author, painter, sculptor, composer, or performer is working for a corporate overlord, he or she gets paid over time as the product sells. That means that he or she has spent years creating something that will help support his or her family afterwards. The incentive to create is based on the promise that the creation will be worth something to his or her family going forward, and it is that promise that encourages authors to accept that delayed payback. If you change the law so that the delayed payback won't happen at all if you die too soon, you're encouraging people to limit themselves to jobs that pay you as you go along, and thus significantly reducing the incentive to create.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to create creative works. It's unimportant whether copyright will continue to encourage a particular author to create new works. The promise that the new work would pay to feed his or her family after its creation was what encouraged the author to create the existing work. Therefore, it should not matter whether the author is alive or dead; the author's kids or other beneficiaries should have the right to that income.
Further, your scheme could encourage less reputable publishers to off their authors so that they don't have to keep paying royalties. :-)
I'm strongly of the opinion that copyright terms should be for a period of 14 years, renewable by the author or his/her descendants for 14 more. The author's death should have no part in the copyright term whatsoever.
You can legitimately argue that extending copyright beyond some point ceases to be a motivator for the creative process, but cutting off copyright at ten years is basically cutting the knees out from under book authors. Indeed, if you're even asking about people who have been dead for hundreds of years, you completely missed my point. I'm not talking about somebody digging up something written fifty or a hundred years ago and thinking, "I'd like to make a movie version of this." I'm talking about the fact that with the relatively rare exception of books and movies written simultaneously (pre-greenlit movies), it normally takes more than ten years to go from "Hey, this book got published" to "Hey, this movie got released":
So even in the best case, the movie company would be barely halfway through their release process when they stopped owing the author a penny. Drag their heels another two years, and they'll still be able to easily leech off of the author's success without having to give anything back. That's just not right.
In effect, limiting copyright to ten years would ensure that only three types of people continue to write:
If ever there were a way to guarantee that the quality of creative works will go into the toilet, a 10 year maximum copyright duration is it. That's just absurdly too short for any sort of literary work, and anyone who thinks otherwise has clearly not thought through the effects of such a change.
I'm going to suggest that everyone in here is forgetting about secondary rights. A masterpiece book makes a lot of money in the first few years. Ten years later, somebody gets around to making a movie version. The author of the original book deserves to get royalties from that. It isn't fair to allow freeloading by a major industry off the hard work of an individual, as would be the case if copyright durations were so absurdly short.
Copyright durations should be 14 years, with the option to extend for a second 14. Anything shorter and content creators will be exploited by big corporations. You know, as in, "Why would I pay you royalties for your story when I can just keep that submission instead of shredding it, and publish it in ten years for free?"
When you have websites like Facebook that, by default, use unencrypted HTTP and a trivially sniffable session cookie for their authentication, there's really nothing a user can do to protect themselves. (Okay, now they offer HTTPS, but that wasn't always the case.)
The problem with HTTPS, of course, is that it is seriously heavyweight. Most content doesn't need encryption; it just needs authentication. For those sites, SSL is serious overkill.
What this really points out is the desperate need for a standard mechanism of authentication that is not based on cookies, but rather nonce-based, similar to the way digest authentication works, but integrated with web pages so it doesn't feel ugly and bolted on. Until we get that, there's really no point in users bothering to secure their accounts. Why choose a strong password when you're basically sending it back and forth on the Internet equivalent of a postcard?
In my original post, everywhere I said "lux", I should have said "average indoor lux", i.e. if a window is of a size that it provides an average of 100 lux illumination indoors. It was not intended to suggest that the sun provides only 100 lux.
You're talking about 1,000-10,000 lux outdoors. In places where you have solid glass (e.g. IL1 at Apple), sure, cutting out 80% of the light probably wouldn't be a show stopper. In a typical home, however, the amount of light that comes inside is a small fraction of that even with clear windows because you neither have a glass ceiling nor solid glass walls.
Recall that perceived brightness is lux per square foot. Outdoors, 1,000 lux seems bright because it is shining on everything. Now shine it on only a few square feet of a room near the window. The rest of the room has only reflected light. Even for a 12x12x8 room with an 8x6 window, the sun is covering only fifty or sixty square feet of floor out of a 144 square foot floor, or well under half the floor. By the time you reflect this around the entire room, you're probably getting only a few percent of the exterior illumination unless your building is all glass and/or mirrors. You're talking about adding another 80-90% cut on top of that. This means you will almost certainly have to use lighting during the day where you otherwise would not have.
I live in a house with lots of (nearly clear) windows (covering almost half of each exterior wall, plus some skylights). Even with the shades open, in full sun, the lighting indoors is only adequate, not bright by any means. If I cut 90% of that light out, it would be nowhere near adequate even in full sun.
If cutting out 80% of the light were a good idea, I would expect buildings to be doing this frequently. By contrast, if anything, the trend for the past decade has been to increase the number of windows and skylights to bring in more natural light, not less, because 40% of an average commercial building's electrical costs come from lighting alone. (Source: Velux)
Yeah, but if you're so financially neophytic that you don't have enough cash in the bank to cover one month's expenses, you'd have to be pretty much a complete idiot to get a mortgage, and a bank would have to be doubly so to give you one. Just saying.