Monopoly... mono... kind of indicates the singular so I don't see how multiple publishers can have a singular monopoly. Certainly, the big 5 can be dickish but there are hundreds if not thousands of smaller publishers out there; I work for one. I would consider dumping product as an abuse of a monopoly and Amazon had done just that with our books in the past and there's no reason they won't do so in the future to further cement their monopoly in online physical book sales and e-books via the Kindle.
I work for a publisher and I can attest that Amazon has indeed sold our books below what they pay us. Amazon can most certainly afford it and they only need to do so long as competitors exist. Book retailers are already struggling so it wouldn't take too long to knock out all but those that have other sources of revenue.
I work for a publishing company and... this is going to blow your mind... a significant majority of our authors wouldn't want to have to be responsible for editing, promoting, designing, and selling their product. They also tend to really like that we give them money in advance before they even have a finished manuscript. Their book could sell zero copies but they at least got several grand out of the deal; it's a comforting thought when putting in months of effort.
Are there examples of authors out there who do like to take the hands on approach and can it work out for them? Sure. I seriously doubt however that our 60+ year old Amish fiction author wants to try and figure out why InDesign hyphenates across a page break despite being told not to when you add a hyperlink text destination for the table of content.
Why do publishers care about this? I work for a publisher and Amazon has rapidly become our largest customer and is essentially a monopoly in online sales of physical books as well as e-books via the Kindle. Amazon is able to price their products below cost because they have other revenue streams to make up for it; our other customers do not. We would like to see our other customers survive and maintain some diversity in our customer base. If Amazon is allowed to dump their products that will certainly lead to furthering their monopoly. Are there laws and protections regarding dumping? Sure... but I doubt they would be timely enough to help our already struggling retailers. You can certainly ridicule this as an outdated business model but the publisher's perspective is clear: if you allow Amazon to price their competition out of business via dumping they will, it will work, and the publishing ecosystem will suffer.
>it's with the middle men who take the majority of the profits
And the majority of the risk. Publishers put up the author's advance and invest the time and money to bring the book to market before seeing a single dime. If the books is a flop, and a majority of books are flops, the author keeps their advance and the publisher just eats it. The retailers, in most cases, can return the books for a full refund and often enough refuse to pay the publisher.
As mentioned above, it's speculation that drives the markets. That is to say, people try to gamble on the price of oil going up or down. So the actual production
levels at the current date are not the entire story. The number of permits for new drilling has supposedly plummeted in recent months. If permits aren't being given now then in the future production is going to go down and prices will go up. Due to speculation... the prices will go up now for the perceived drop in future supply.
To be clear, I'm not entirely convinced this is the only factor involved or even that it has some significant impact on the price of gasoline. It does however suggest why the amount of current production isn't correlated to current gas prices. They're not, they're tied to what people think future production will be.
I work for a small publisher. I don't particularly agree with our pricing scheme nor DRM but that's not my department.
If you want your books on the millions of Kindles out there then you had better have it available via Amazon. It's a simple as that. We will sell our books to practically any retailer and we have a growing number that sell ebooks. In terms of Amazon using their monopoly... they already had one with physical books and all the arm twisting and discounts stuff applies equally there.
Disclaimer: I work for a book publisher.
The author takes nearly zero percent of the financial risks. Contracts vary of course but it is typical for an author to receive an advance on signing the contract and on delivering the manuscript. These are advances against the royalty the book is expected to earn but unless there is a breach of contract that advance is not returned to the publisher. The publisher then puts all the money up front to edit, design, print, and distribute the book to retailers. If the book does not sell then the publisher gives the retailer a full refund and eats the whole thing as a loss. E-books are great because they take out the costs associated with printing the books and dealing with returns but they still eat the costs when a book flops... and most books flop.
So yes, self publishing is a great option for those authors who are willing to invest the time to write a book, the money to hire professional editors and designers, and the risk that they won't make a dime. Oh, and they have to figure out how to market it, convert it into an e-book, and deal with all the sales bullshit. This might be crazy talk but most authors are dedicated people who love to write books. Few desire to spend the time and energy on the business side of things to produce, market, and sell those books.
I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that shakeup. I work for a publisher and we, like many, generally welcome the transition to e-books. Not having to print, stock, ship, and process returns for physical books is a dream. However, the actual printing is a very small portion of what we do. Finding good authors/material in the sea of crap that gets submitted is a job unto itself. Taking the manuscript and properly editing and designing it is not small task either; you'd be surprised how many full-time authors would fail a grammar test. Dealing with hundreds of retailers isn't what most authors want to be in the business of doing. Getting those retailers to shell out thousands in advanced royalties isn't all that likely. Publishers take all of the financial risks in publishing; if a book doesn't sell the retailers who "bought" them can return them for a full refund no matter what the condition of the books (they love stickers). That is petty much THE reason you pay $15 for a paperback; consumers end up paying for all the books that didn't sell.
There's plenty of examples out there of technology that has rapid growth in the first years and then levels off with slow growth. The existence of a plateau is the suspicion but at the end of the day the goal is to make as many e-books available as possible. Every new title we release has an e-book now so if tomorrow e-book sales jumped to 50% that would be fine with us.
Print on demand has become much cheaper these days and we actually do a lot of it already albeit internally. Rather than just put a book out of print we'll call it out of stock indefinitely but if a store wants it we'll print it as a short run via a POD system. However it is still limited in terms of print quality and cover, paper, and binding options. For novels this isn't a huge barrier but non-fiction, specifically expensive Academic books, would be a tough sell without a nice cloth binding. So until POD has true parity with what we can get from an actual press it won't fully supplant how it's done now.
I would agree, it does sound a lot like the music industry although despite their own best efforts to destroy themselves they're still around. I would guess that it's easier to make a book than music but it's much harder to do it well. There's no formula you can run a manuscript through to determine if it's good or not. We're trying to not make any rash decisions and move at the right pace, not too fast and not too slow.
I'm making an assumption here, so I apologize if I'm wrong, but it doesn't sound like you've worked with authors a whole lot. If your only interaction is via blogs then you're getting a very skewed impression. While a few will certainly jump ship, the vast majority of them have no interest. Remember, they sought us out, not the reverse.
Self publishing isn't a new idea and this isn't the first piece of technology that's come along that 'threatened' the publishing industry. Each time there were a few successes and a much larger number of abject failures. Ever since the personal computer came into being we've been called the buggy whip industry. Again, to clarify, everyone sees the writing on the wall and nobody in their right mind is saying no to e-books. However, no one is making any rash moves.
Well yea, publishers are certainly struggling with this whole thing and how to pull it off. Part of the problem at the moment is both legal and technical. On the legal side, publishers who have been around for a while have a huge backlog of stuff that they'd like to release. However, no one was thinking of electronic rights even as recently as a decade ago. So every single contract has to be reviewed to determine if the book can be sold electronically. For us that meant manually reading about 10 filing cabinets full of contracts. On the technical side, there's huge confusion about how to produce these things. EPub is emerging as a standard but there's tons of formatting issues and to date we haven't found any silver bullet to turn a PDF or InDesign file into a beautiful looking ePub. You can pay an off-shore conversion house, but you get what you pay for.
Publishers have a ton of experience working with printing presses and have developed a process to publish a quality product. None of that in in place yet for e-books. So yes, for sure, there are authors out there who, if they do the right things and get their stuff in order, can do much better. Will Wheaton would be a good example. But you're probably not going to hear a lot from those who tried and failed and trust me... publishing is awash with failures.
On the price point business, your point is well taken and rational. However, remember that an author who self publishes and fails isn't out much. If it doesn't sell at price A he can bump it down to price B and see what happens since his overhead is... almost nill. Authors who get a publishing deal tend to demand advances and a fairly large percentage of books never recover that advance in full. That's one of the big reasons you're paying $14.99 for a book that cost 50 cents to print. Failure is expensive for a publisher and the market is extremely fickle. A publisher just hopes that every few years they get a book that sells like crazy to make up for all the others that were dead on arrival.
I work for a medium sized book publisher and like many others we are scrambling to put e-books out. Six percent sounds about right, last year it was 4 and the year before that it was zero. From a publisher's perspective, we're still waiting to see how it all pans out. The suspicion is that this growth rate won't maintain itself and that there's a plateau somewhere. Where that is, no one knows, but no one that I know of in the industry is predicting any sort of e-book takeover in the next decade or two. So yes there's huge growth but no one's getting rid of their printers just yet.
Publishers love e-books: no shipping, no warehousing, and most importantly no returns. Most books are sold to retail outlets on the basis that they can return them for a full refund if they don't sell. Since getting shelf space can boost sales you often see titles with an over 50% return rate. Also, for very little money you can take titles that are out of print or didn't sell well and put them out there. Titles once thought dead can now eek out a few extra sales.
You are mostly correct.
In my project, there's no support for automatically importing or being alerted about new updates from vendors. I'm not aware of any centralized source for that sort of data. If such a thing exists, I'd be interested to know about it. So, to be clear, Secunia has a definite edge there that I can't conceive of matching without some freely available repository.
However there is some value for the software publisher. One of the reasons that Microsoft released the API was in the hope that publishers would create and release catalogs for their programs although few have done so. These catalogs would make it dead simple for the administrator to manage that publisher's application in their environment. My project currently doesn't support those catalogs, mainly because so few exist, but it's on the proverbial to-do list.
The current version of WSUS includes an API that allows, among other things, anyone to publish third party updates through the WSUS system. I've been working on a project for a few months that does just that: https://sourceforge.net/projects/localupdatepubl
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Monopoly ... mono ... kind of indicates the singular so I don't see how multiple publishers can have a singular monopoly. Certainly, the big 5 can be dickish but there are hundreds if not thousands of smaller publishers out there; I work for one. I would consider dumping product as an abuse of a monopoly and Amazon had done just that with our books in the past and there's no reason they won't do so in the future to further cement their monopoly in online physical book sales and e-books via the Kindle.
I work for a publisher and I can attest that Amazon has indeed sold our books below what they pay us. Amazon can most certainly afford it and they only need to do so long as competitors exist. Book retailers are already struggling so it wouldn't take too long to knock out all but those that have other sources of revenue.
I work for a publishing company and ... this is going to blow your mind ... a significant majority of our authors wouldn't want to have to be responsible for editing, promoting, designing, and selling their product. They also tend to really like that we give them money in advance before they even have a finished manuscript. Their book could sell zero copies but they at least got several grand out of the deal; it's a comforting thought when putting in months of effort.
Are there examples of authors out there who do like to take the hands on approach and can it work out for them? Sure. I seriously doubt however that our 60+ year old Amish fiction author wants to try and figure out why InDesign hyphenates across a page break despite being told not to when you add a hyperlink text destination for the table of content.
Why do publishers care about this? I work for a publisher and Amazon has rapidly become our largest customer and is essentially a monopoly in online sales of physical books as well as e-books via the Kindle. Amazon is able to price their products below cost because they have other revenue streams to make up for it; our other customers do not. We would like to see our other customers survive and maintain some diversity in our customer base. If Amazon is allowed to dump their products that will certainly lead to furthering their monopoly. Are there laws and protections regarding dumping? Sure ... but I doubt they would be timely enough to help our already struggling retailers. You can certainly ridicule this as an outdated business model but the publisher's perspective is clear: if you allow Amazon to price their competition out of business via dumping they will, it will work, and the publishing ecosystem will suffer.
>it's with the middle men who take the majority of the profits And the majority of the risk. Publishers put up the author's advance and invest the time and money to bring the book to market before seeing a single dime. If the books is a flop, and a majority of books are flops, the author keeps their advance and the publisher just eats it. The retailers, in most cases, can return the books for a full refund and often enough refuse to pay the publisher.
As mentioned above, it's speculation that drives the markets. That is to say, people try to gamble on the price of oil going up or down. So the actual production levels at the current date are not the entire story. The number of permits for new drilling has supposedly plummeted in recent months. If permits aren't being given now then in the future production is going to go down and prices will go up. Due to speculation ... the prices will go up now for the perceived drop in future supply.
To be clear, I'm not entirely convinced this is the only factor involved or even that it has some significant impact on the price of gasoline. It does however suggest why the amount of current production isn't correlated to current gas prices. They're not, they're tied to what people think future production will be.
I work for a small publisher. I don't particularly agree with our pricing scheme nor DRM but that's not my department. If you want your books on the millions of Kindles out there then you had better have it available via Amazon. It's a simple as that. We will sell our books to practically any retailer and we have a growing number that sell ebooks. In terms of Amazon using their monopoly ... they already had one with physical books and all the arm twisting and discounts stuff applies equally there.
Disclaimer: I work for a book publisher. The author takes nearly zero percent of the financial risks. Contracts vary of course but it is typical for an author to receive an advance on signing the contract and on delivering the manuscript. These are advances against the royalty the book is expected to earn but unless there is a breach of contract that advance is not returned to the publisher. The publisher then puts all the money up front to edit, design, print, and distribute the book to retailers. If the book does not sell then the publisher gives the retailer a full refund and eats the whole thing as a loss. E-books are great because they take out the costs associated with printing the books and dealing with returns but they still eat the costs when a book flops ... and most books flop.
So yes, self publishing is a great option for those authors who are willing to invest the time to write a book, the money to hire professional editors and designers, and the risk that they won't make a dime. Oh, and they have to figure out how to market it, convert it into an e-book, and deal with all the sales bullshit. This might be crazy talk but most authors are dedicated people who love to write books. Few desire to spend the time and energy on the business side of things to produce, market, and sell those books.
I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that shakeup. I work for a publisher and we, like many, generally welcome the transition to e-books. Not having to print, stock, ship, and process returns for physical books is a dream. However, the actual printing is a very small portion of what we do. Finding good authors/material in the sea of crap that gets submitted is a job unto itself. Taking the manuscript and properly editing and designing it is not small task either; you'd be surprised how many full-time authors would fail a grammar test. Dealing with hundreds of retailers isn't what most authors want to be in the business of doing. Getting those retailers to shell out thousands in advanced royalties isn't all that likely. Publishers take all of the financial risks in publishing; if a book doesn't sell the retailers who "bought" them can return them for a full refund no matter what the condition of the books (they love stickers). That is petty much THE reason you pay $15 for a paperback; consumers end up paying for all the books that didn't sell.
There's plenty of examples out there of technology that has rapid growth in the first years and then levels off with slow growth. The existence of a plateau is the suspicion but at the end of the day the goal is to make as many e-books available as possible. Every new title we release has an e-book now so if tomorrow e-book sales jumped to 50% that would be fine with us.
Print on demand has become much cheaper these days and we actually do a lot of it already albeit internally. Rather than just put a book out of print we'll call it out of stock indefinitely but if a store wants it we'll print it as a short run via a POD system. However it is still limited in terms of print quality and cover, paper, and binding options. For novels this isn't a huge barrier but non-fiction, specifically expensive Academic books, would be a tough sell without a nice cloth binding. So until POD has true parity with what we can get from an actual press it won't fully supplant how it's done now.
I would agree, it does sound a lot like the music industry although despite their own best efforts to destroy themselves they're still around. I would guess that it's easier to make a book than music but it's much harder to do it well. There's no formula you can run a manuscript through to determine if it's good or not. We're trying to not make any rash decisions and move at the right pace, not too fast and not too slow. I'm making an assumption here, so I apologize if I'm wrong, but it doesn't sound like you've worked with authors a whole lot. If your only interaction is via blogs then you're getting a very skewed impression. While a few will certainly jump ship, the vast majority of them have no interest. Remember, they sought us out, not the reverse. Self publishing isn't a new idea and this isn't the first piece of technology that's come along that 'threatened' the publishing industry. Each time there were a few successes and a much larger number of abject failures. Ever since the personal computer came into being we've been called the buggy whip industry. Again, to clarify, everyone sees the writing on the wall and nobody in their right mind is saying no to e-books. However, no one is making any rash moves.
Well yea, publishers are certainly struggling with this whole thing and how to pull it off. Part of the problem at the moment is both legal and technical. On the legal side, publishers who have been around for a while have a huge backlog of stuff that they'd like to release. However, no one was thinking of electronic rights even as recently as a decade ago. So every single contract has to be reviewed to determine if the book can be sold electronically. For us that meant manually reading about 10 filing cabinets full of contracts. On the technical side, there's huge confusion about how to produce these things. EPub is emerging as a standard but there's tons of formatting issues and to date we haven't found any silver bullet to turn a PDF or InDesign file into a beautiful looking ePub. You can pay an off-shore conversion house, but you get what you pay for. Publishers have a ton of experience working with printing presses and have developed a process to publish a quality product. None of that in in place yet for e-books. So yes, for sure, there are authors out there who, if they do the right things and get their stuff in order, can do much better. Will Wheaton would be a good example. But you're probably not going to hear a lot from those who tried and failed and trust me ... publishing is awash with failures.
On the price point business, your point is well taken and rational. However, remember that an author who self publishes and fails isn't out much. If it doesn't sell at price A he can bump it down to price B and see what happens since his overhead is ... almost nill. Authors who get a publishing deal tend to demand advances and a fairly large percentage of books never recover that advance in full. That's one of the big reasons you're paying $14.99 for a book that cost 50 cents to print. Failure is expensive for a publisher and the market is extremely fickle. A publisher just hopes that every few years they get a book that sells like crazy to make up for all the others that were dead on arrival.
I work for a medium sized book publisher and like many others we are scrambling to put e-books out. Six percent sounds about right, last year it was 4 and the year before that it was zero. From a publisher's perspective, we're still waiting to see how it all pans out. The suspicion is that this growth rate won't maintain itself and that there's a plateau somewhere. Where that is, no one knows, but no one that I know of in the industry is predicting any sort of e-book takeover in the next decade or two. So yes there's huge growth but no one's getting rid of their printers just yet. Publishers love e-books: no shipping, no warehousing, and most importantly no returns. Most books are sold to retail outlets on the basis that they can return them for a full refund if they don't sell. Since getting shelf space can boost sales you often see titles with an over 50% return rate. Also, for very little money you can take titles that are out of print or didn't sell well and put them out there. Titles once thought dead can now eek out a few extra sales.
If we're lucky, they'll use that extra time to brew beer.
You are mostly correct. In my project, there's no support for automatically importing or being alerted about new updates from vendors. I'm not aware of any centralized source for that sort of data. If such a thing exists, I'd be interested to know about it. So, to be clear, Secunia has a definite edge there that I can't conceive of matching without some freely available repository. However there is some value for the software publisher. One of the reasons that Microsoft released the API was in the hope that publishers would create and release catalogs for their programs although few have done so. These catalogs would make it dead simple for the administrator to manage that publisher's application in their environment. My project currently doesn't support those catalogs, mainly because so few exist, but it's on the proverbial to-do list.
The current version of WSUS includes an API that allows, among other things, anyone to publish third party updates through the WSUS system. I've been working on a project for a few months that does just that: https://sourceforge.net/projects/localupdatepubl