So first of all, way to be a condescending jerk in the tone of your post.
Ok, since I guess my first sentence (I read over the rest of my post and don't think it condescending..?) was a bit strident, I apologize for saying that your suggestions was "insane." My bad. I absolutely DO stand by my statement that you obviously did not know what you were talking about when you entered the conversation.
Second, you're making my point for me. There are small publishers out there. But there are still far fewer publisher slots for books than there are authors hence the publisher is the scare resoruce.
I disagree with this statement and believe you are factually incorrect. (As I'll explain in the rest of this post -- to be clear when I said "area of academic publishing I'm currently working" this is a very niche field--there are far more than a dozen publishers out there...)
Additionally, all the costs you list are not bearable by a lone author, yet. Hence authors don't yet have bargaining power and publishers are able to act a middle man controlling access to the market
I disagree with this statement and believe you are factually incorrect again. What I described is the traditional small-medium publisher model. What authors like the one discussed in this article expect (ie, $10,000 advances, etc). There are all kinds of publishers out there, for instance, vanity publishers. There exist publishers who will publish your book if YOU pay them. You could print 2000 copies of a book you wrote for easy less than $10,000 out of your pocket if you wanted. That's bearable for many people. If you don't want standing inventory, marketing, professional layout, etc, go to on-demand publishing/printing. lulu.com. There's an option for everybody.
Did it used to be worse with fewer publishers controlling entry? sure. Is it going to get better as costs come down and there aren't barriers to entry and competition of product not competition of distribution becomes the deciding factor? yep.
What is "it" and how is it going to get better? The publishing industry is full of competition right now. To claim otherwise I believe shows an ignorance of the facts. From vanity publishers (heck to lulu.com!!) to small publishers to giant corporations, there are a huge variety of publishers.
Third I didn't use the word "cartel" or indicate any type of conspiracy. In fact I said they got to act like an effective trust through the use of "industry practices" without actually being a trust. Once the barriers to entry come down the same effect that let little publishers get in an compete with big ones will let authors get in and compete with all publishers. Middle men are only useful in industries with significant barriers to entry or difficult distribution.
Ok, so you say "industry standard practices that let them act like a trust" and I summarize as cartel. Difference?
Once the barriers to entry come down the same effect that let little publishers get in an compete with big ones will let authors get in and compete with all publishers. Middle men are only useful in industries with significant barriers to entry or difficult distribution
What exact barriers are you talking about? Middle men are useful where they provide a useful service. The 20th century saw perhaps the greatest rise of middlemen ever! Heck, witness the demise of "For Sale By Owner"... realtors... my personal pet peeve in our new society of helplessness.
I will say one thing I agree with you on--no industry--be it banking, newspapers, automakers, or publishers DESERVES to survive merely because it did at some point in the past. Everybody must change to survive. The publishing industry in the last 30 years has gone through many major changes and consolidations and new companies emerging. This will no doubt continue (and ev
Well, I could talk about this for a long time, but I'll try to be brief--short answer, maybe:)
Self-publishing is certainly viable (and becoming more so) for many people. It's getting to the point that most anybody (or anybody with a academic department that has a tech person, etc would can help out) can easily self publish. Still, one would be amazed at the number of people we still run into who have trouble formatting a basic Word document... I also find it surprising just how much cachet getting published STILL carries in academia. It's part of the process. Not quite a hazing ritual, but something everybody goes through. I think--at the moment at least--self-publishing is still looked down upon, but in the future, who knows.
I don't know that self-publishing necessarily opens more possibilities for peer review. I actually think blogging and things like the Social Science Research Network have a bigger potential. It's easier to weed stuff out online then it is to read a lot of books.
One thing I think is for certain is that publishers WILL have to change, and change radically.
Interesting, I didn't realize technical authors routinely got 5%. I work in academic publishing, and our "standards" are 10-15%, as high as 20% (RARELY over). I don't think we've ever gone under 10%.
As I mentioned in a different posts though, computer books do tend to be more complicated and expensive than a standard academic monograph.
Also, the posters here who say that the author has given away exclusive rights are probably right: it is standard to do that. Publishers don't care if you retain the copyright because the contract is generally exclusive
I again posted snippets of an actual contract. Usually the publisher has certain rights--for instance, controlling reproduction of material. They also have certain duties.
Because they don't have to. They have "industry standard practices" that effectively let them act like a trust without technically being a trust. It's a form of implicitly limiting labor costs. As publishing becomes more and more frictionless and major publishers less and less valuable they'll get smaller, control less, and authors will earn more as they become more competitive. As long as they control the entry point into a market however they can pretty much use these types of practices.
This is insane.There are TONS of small presses out there--Apress is one of them. It's true that publishing has become more homogenized over the years (in the area of academic publishing I'm currently working, 30 years ago there were maybe a 1-2 dozen fair sized publishers--today they have mostly been bought out, so you have 3 giants, 1-2 small/medium, and a number of very small) but there's not any kind of "cartel" that you're fantastically believing in.
Since you obviously don't know the numbers, I'll run them for you.
Book list is $40 Average discount to bookstores/amazon/wholesalers/etc is probably around 50% -- that means when Amazon buys one copy of his book, it costs them $20. The royalty ranges from 10-20% (this is "industry standard" I suppose -- usually 10% is a low royalty, while 20% is a high royalty). Thus when the publisher sells a book for $20 to amazon, for a 10% royalty the publisher nets $18. So the publisher makes $20 a book, minus $2 for royalty;
Let's start a tally, publisher profit so far--publisher can make $18.
Now what costs does the publisher have? They have to print the book. Printing prices vary widely based on cover type, binding type, number of pages, color/b&w, paper type, book size (width x height, etc). Without having seen the book in question here or knowing how big the print run is, etc, it's hard to say how much it cost to print. A unit price of roughly $6.00 is probably not unreasonable (could be higher, could be lower). Thus if the initial print run was 10,000 copies with a unit price of 6.00, the publisher had to put down $60,000 with no guarantee of a single sale.
Next, the creation of the book. Again, depending on the publisher and complexity of the book, the creation of the page layout and editing costs can vary widely. Costs again can vary widely--probably from a low of about $3 (possibly lower for a very simply formatted book) to about $6-7 a page for more complicated books. I've only worked on one code book, and it was definitely more complicated than say an academic monograph. If editorial input (quality control, writing editing, code checking, etc) is included, that can be far more than $3 a page. We'll assume this book was not edited, and that it cost the publisher $6 a page to do the production work. Book is 660 pages = $3960. Another often unrealized cost is the creation of an index. I would think many computer programmer types would be able to create their own, but for an academic monograph, the creation of an index by a professional indexer can run upwards of $4 a page too.
The link is down, but I think the author received two payments of $6000 for an advance? $12,000 cost for the publisher.
I'm not even going into the costs of warehousing, shipping & returns, sales/accounting, and marketing. Too difficult to quantify without knowing more details. Here's a question though--do you know how much space 10000 copies of a 700 page book (weighing 2 lbs each according to amazon) take up? I would estimate it takes up about 20 full sized warehouse palettes.
Ok, so so far we have a minimum of about $75,000 (60,000 print + 4000 production + 12000 advance) in expenses for the publisher before a single book is sold. Making ~$20 per copy, the publisher has to sell almost 4000 copies just to break even.
You really expect publishers to shell out 70k, 80k -- including large advances -- and then only break a profit after selling 10,000 copies. Most small publishers sell books that never sell that many copies in a lifetime!
(I'd be happy to discuss further -- this IS a rather simplistic breakdown, and the numbers are different for smaller print runs, etc)
I've worked for several publishers over the years, and even in cases where the author keeps the copyright, the publishers is usually granted the enforcement rights, and other portions of the rights. For instance, one would not expect an author to be forced to defend his copyright in court.
I looked at a contract that was executed several years ago:
Check the italicized portion:
1.0:called the work, hereby grants and assigns to the Publisher the exclusive world publishing rights of the work including the sole rights to translations, selections, expansions, abridgments, as well as all electronic production and reproduction thereof, and the Publisher agrees and has the exclusive rights to publish or reproduce the work during the continuance of the copyright...
9.0: That the Author agrees not to publish--or permit to be published without the written consent of the Publisher--any other book on the same subject written or edited by the Author that will injure the market made for this book, nor to publish or cause to be published any other edition of this book revised, corrected, abridged or otherwise without the written consent of the Publisher.
In the case of every publisher I have ever worked with (and from dealing with hundreds of authors), this has literally NEVER been an issue -- the author requests rights back from the publisher, and he or she gets them 99% of the time. Literally, I don't think I've ever heard of a case of a publisher not following the author's wishes (and I've dealt with a number of authors who were switching publishers with a revised/second/third/fourth/etc edition of their book).
Speaking as a someone with experience in the small academic publishing world, publishers take big risks with signing authors and issuing advances. If the books never materialize, there's actually very little most publishers can do. ie, you have to eat the 10k or whatever, as any law suit would be expensive and uncertain. Thus the extreme legalese.
A few points from the article:
The retail price (RRP) of Beginning Ruby is $40 (give or take a penny) but my publisher, Apress, makes a varying amount per book – I don’t know why.
Very simple -- publishers sell books at widely ranging discounts, from a low of about 20% to a single bookstore, to maybe 40% to wholesalers, to maybe 60% to amazon. Yeah, so for that $40 list price on Amazon, Amazon probably only had to pay < $20! (Yeah, publishing really isn't as highly marked up by the publishers as it might seem!!)
(About an advance> The only advantage to you is that if your book bombs and doesn’t even sell enough copies to pay back the advance, you (usually) don’t have to give the publisher back a penny.
I've never heard of authors having to pay their advances back if their books bomb or don't materialize. I'm sure it happens with bigger publishers and bigger advances, but most of the time the publisher can't do much.
On the royalty statements above, you should see references to “Licensed Rights.” My first editor told me that these are payments you receive for foreign versions of your book, for inclusion on systems like O’Reilly Safari, and “similar.” I’ve asked a couple of times now but I’ve never found out what these amounts are specifically for and I’m not aware of any translated editions of Beginning Ruby.
Often times these fees are for translations or rights to use small segments. For instance if a professor wants to use one chapter but not the whole book, that might be a small licensing fee. Or if somebody wanted to translate the book into Macedonian, we might charge them $500, which is split 50/50 between the publisher and the author.
Here's what comes through on your posts (and my guess why you were modded troll)--you act as if you know better than everybody else. You believe that you know what good music is (by acting as if the question is simple and saying others don't have "aural taste buds" as good as yours). Your mini-TV rant is classically parodied by the onion.
"Good music is good music" (etc) -- well who decides that? You seem to waver from your statement of "what's popular!" Believe it or not, standards over time DO change. Heck, again believe it or not, reasonable smart people can disagree about what good music is! Like I said in a different post, I'm a big believer in the latin phrase de gustibus non est disputandum -- there's no disputing taste!
Umm, why is it great that I've never owned a TV?
I figured you wanted to be praised, else why mention it after trashing television as a medium? Or why say you want to "limit" passive entertainment -- again, you sound as if you know best, and other people should just act like you, or listen to you.
~shrug~ maybe you DON'T actually feel like this, but it's sure as heck how your posts come across! I don't think you deserved the troll mod, but I can see how it happened.
I guess it was a combination of bad acting+bad dialog that really got to me in *some places*. There definitely WAS good acting and good dialog--I thought G'kar and Londo were real highlights.
Sinclair is an example of a character who made me wince most of the time he talked.
I don't understand why people think Fox would WANT to kill it though? I just don't understand the logic. There is of course the inestimable fact of corporate ineptitude, but a conspiracy to kill Firefly seems farfetched to me.
Serenity was positively reviewed. It didn't fail because of bad reviews imho. If it was so mismatched and such a failed "mashup" I don't think it would have been positively reviewed.
My point in noting that Fox and Universal were both involved with the franchise in different ways was to say that two different mega media corporations both failed to gain traction. Do you remember the weeks leading up to Serenity's release? With all the word of mouth and internet fervor, many fans were already talking about reviving the series based on the movie, or what kind of sequels could be produced...
I was going to respond at greater length, but with your profession of hating tv, I thought I might link to the onion as well: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694
Art is art and entertainment is entertainment. The two don't always meet! There was (is) a school of avant guard musical thought that music should be written to be enjoyable only those people who truly understand music theory--not just the unwashed masses. Thus you get music that sounds like crap to 99% of people, and britny spears bubble gum pop that is popular. People are entertained by Britney--so what? For every Milton there's a 100 street poets who entertained with vulgar rhymes, etc. High and low, both valid. Just because YOU personally don't like something you see on tv, why is that so bad?
It's really great that you've never had a TV, but I guess my real question is--if you're so ignorant of what's on TV, why are you commenting as if you were an expert of what's on?
Yes, Fox perhaps did Firefly a disservice by playing the episodes out of order. I thought Serenity (pilot) was a boring episode personally. I had a few friends over to watch it when it actually aired, and not one of them cared to watch anymore Firefly. Interesting how many Firefly fans talk about train job and the Mal-kicking-into-the-engine scene as the scene that sold them, yet also talk about how vital the boring pilot was? Shrug. I'm not going to argue that the situation on Fox was ideal, but the belief that it failed SOLELY because Fox screwed them over, and that had Fox just does one or two things differently, all these fans (who again, failed to show up to a heavily promoted movie) would start watching just seems absolutely ludicrous.
In any case, few (any?) series had as strong a word of mouth campaign. Firefly had excellent DVD sales. It had nerd fandom almost universally singing its praising.
When push came to shove, the viewership failed to rise when it was on TV, and didnt bother to see the movie.
As far as the movie goes, the real problem was trying to cater both to the casual crowd and the fans. The movie's plot was half a retelling of some of the tv series and half a completely new story, so it ended up being a mashup that failed to truly cater to either.
So your argument is that because of plot technicalities, the true fans didn't show up at the theaters, and people who would go to a random science fiction movie didn't either. I'll tell you why the random science fiction viewers didn't show up -- "I am to misbehave." So. Lame. In any case, your review seems odd given the highly positive reviews the movie got...
So was what I wrote just over your head or what? How does the fact that Fox aired episodes in a different order than intended make a movie--by Universal!--a complete box office failure?
Other than Doctor Who (which I like despite the problems, not because of them), every single series I've named is far more solid, far less fluffy, than Star Trek. And even Dr Who is well below ST fluffiness.
Yet the problem is with all those shows is that they suck!:p
I say that tongue in cheek so as not to start a flamewar. I DO hate Dr Who and find it completely unwatchable, but I'm also a big fan of the latin de gustibus non est disputandum -- there's no disputing about taste. I'm fine with the fact that other people like stuff I don't, etc, I just wanted to note that lack or excess of technobabble does not make or break a show's enjoyability. It's characters and plots that matter--even in s.f.
Look, Firefly was cancelled because it was watched by few people. Yes, the DVDs ended up selling well and it became a cult classic for a niche group of people.
Joss even got his shot with the Serenity movie--which failed to break even! I do partially blame the shitty trailers (really--who thinks "I aim to misbehave" sounds cool??)
Face it. Firefly was not popular. The series was not popular, and the movie was not popular. To show you just how unpopular Serenity was--Star Trek Insurrection (as an unabashed trekkie I dont hesitate to call it complete garbage!) made over 1.5 as much money as did Serenity. That's just sad!
So yeah, blame people for not appreciating Joss's wit, blame Fox for not promoting the show how YOU would have promoted the show, but the long and short of it was, the viewer base wasn't there and never materialized. Fox didn't make money on it, nor did Universal. End of story.
Are you just now discovering this divide between high and low culture? Are you really trying to claim that entertainment for entertainment's sake is a new thing (or that TV as a medium is somehow different from others)?
I'm not sure why you're marked as a troll...but...
-I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody. I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody. I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody...
surely this is a configuration issue?
-What's that? The mounted ASIP resource disappeared for a few seconds and now everyone's trying to reconnect? At once? And their workstations are beachballed until the share comes back, even though they have no open resources on it?
This at least is totally fixed in 10.6 -- no more beachballs. Using 10.4 and 10.5 if I forgot to disconnect from network shares at work, that evening at home I would randomly get "Disconnected from share xyz" messages...sometimes 30 minutes later, sometimes an hour, etc. Now it's instantaneous.
The only point I would try to make is that most malware/attacks today seem to require some level of user involvement in terms of downloading and running a program, running an email attachment, etc. It's not like a few years ago where just by being connected to the internet you could immediately get infected (though these attacks do still occur as you mention)
Nothing stops these same kind of "PEBKAC" attacks from working on linux too. If a user is going to download an EXE because they got a greeting card on windows, I doubt they would hesitate to do something similar on linux.
Slashdot Mirror
So first of all, way to be a condescending jerk in the tone of your post.
Ok, since I guess my first sentence (I read over the rest of my post and don't think it condescending..?) was a bit strident, I apologize for saying that your suggestions was "insane." My bad. I absolutely DO stand by my statement that you obviously did not know what you were talking about when you entered the conversation.
Second, you're making my point for me. There are small publishers out there. But there are still far fewer publisher slots for books than there are authors hence the publisher is the scare resoruce.
I disagree with this statement and believe you are factually incorrect. (As I'll explain in the rest of this post -- to be clear when I said "area of academic publishing I'm currently working" this is a very niche field--there are far more than a dozen publishers out there...)
Additionally, all the costs you list are not bearable by a lone author, yet. Hence authors don't yet have bargaining power and publishers are able to act a middle man controlling access to the market
I disagree with this statement and believe you are factually incorrect again. What I described is the traditional small-medium publisher model. What authors like the one discussed in this article expect (ie, $10,000 advances, etc). There are all kinds of publishers out there, for instance, vanity publishers. There exist publishers who will publish your book if YOU pay them. You could print 2000 copies of a book you wrote for easy less than $10,000 out of your pocket if you wanted. That's bearable for many people. If you don't want standing inventory, marketing, professional layout, etc, go to on-demand publishing/printing. lulu.com. There's an option for everybody.
Did it used to be worse with fewer publishers controlling entry? sure. Is it going to get better as costs come down and there aren't barriers to entry and competition of product not competition of distribution becomes the deciding factor? yep.
What is "it" and how is it going to get better? The publishing industry is full of competition right now. To claim otherwise I believe shows an ignorance of the facts. From vanity publishers (heck to lulu.com!!) to small publishers to giant corporations, there are a huge variety of publishers.
Third I didn't use the word "cartel" or indicate any type of conspiracy. In fact I said they got to act like an effective trust through the use of "industry practices" without actually being a trust. Once the barriers to entry come down the same effect that let little publishers get in an compete with big ones will let authors get in and compete with all publishers. Middle men are only useful in industries with significant barriers to entry or difficult distribution.
Ok, so you say "industry standard practices that let them act like a trust" and I summarize as cartel. Difference?
Once the barriers to entry come down the same effect that let little publishers get in an compete with big ones will let authors get in and compete with all publishers. Middle men are only useful in industries with significant barriers to entry or difficult distribution
What exact barriers are you talking about? Middle men are useful where they provide a useful service. The 20th century saw perhaps the greatest rise of middlemen ever! Heck, witness the demise of "For Sale By Owner" ... realtors ... my personal pet peeve in our new society of helplessness.
I will say one thing I agree with you on--no industry--be it banking, newspapers, automakers, or publishers DESERVES to survive merely because it did at some point in the past. Everybody must change to survive. The publishing industry in the last 30 years has gone through many major changes and consolidations and new companies emerging. This will no doubt continue (and ev
Well, I could talk about this for a long time, but I'll try to be brief--short answer, maybe :)
Self-publishing is certainly viable (and becoming more so) for many people. It's getting to the point that most anybody (or anybody with a academic department that has a tech person, etc would can help out) can easily self publish. Still, one would be amazed at the number of people we still run into who have trouble formatting a basic Word document... I also find it surprising just how much cachet getting published STILL carries in academia. It's part of the process. Not quite a hazing ritual, but something everybody goes through. I think--at the moment at least--self-publishing is still looked down upon, but in the future, who knows.
I don't know that self-publishing necessarily opens more possibilities for peer review. I actually think blogging and things like the Social Science Research Network have a bigger potential. It's easier to weed stuff out online then it is to read a lot of books.
One thing I think is for certain is that publishers WILL have to change, and change radically.
Oh I'm sorry, I totally read your post too quickly and misunderstood--you were absolutely clear.
Interesting, I didn't realize technical authors routinely got 5%. I work in academic publishing, and our "standards" are 10-15%, as high as 20% (RARELY over). I don't think we've ever gone under 10%.
As I mentioned in a different posts though, computer books do tend to be more complicated and expensive than a standard academic monograph.
Also, the posters here who say that the author has given away exclusive rights are probably right: it is standard to do that. Publishers don't care if you retain the copyright because the contract is generally exclusive
I again posted snippets of an actual contract. Usually the publisher has certain rights--for instance, controlling reproduction of material. They also have certain duties.
Because they don't have to. They have "industry standard practices" that effectively let them act like a trust without technically being a trust. It's a form of implicitly limiting labor costs. As publishing becomes more and more frictionless and major publishers less and less valuable they'll get smaller, control less, and authors will earn more as they become more competitive. As long as they control the entry point into a market however they can pretty much use these types of practices.
This is insane.There are TONS of small presses out there--Apress is one of them. It's true that publishing has become more homogenized over the years (in the area of academic publishing I'm currently working, 30 years ago there were maybe a 1-2 dozen fair sized publishers--today they have mostly been bought out, so you have 3 giants, 1-2 small/medium, and a number of very small) but there's not any kind of "cartel" that you're fantastically believing in.
Since you obviously don't know the numbers, I'll run them for you.
Book list is $40
Average discount to bookstores/amazon/wholesalers/etc is probably around 50% -- that means when Amazon buys one copy of his book, it costs them $20.
The royalty ranges from 10-20% (this is "industry standard" I suppose -- usually 10% is a low royalty, while 20% is a high royalty). Thus when the publisher sells a book for $20 to amazon, for a 10% royalty the publisher nets $18. So the publisher makes $20 a book, minus $2 for royalty;
Let's start a tally, publisher profit so far--publisher can make $18.
Now what costs does the publisher have? They have to print the book. Printing prices vary widely based on cover type, binding type, number of pages, color/b&w, paper type, book size (width x height, etc). Without having seen the book in question here or knowing how big the print run is, etc, it's hard to say how much it cost to print. A unit price of roughly $6.00 is probably not unreasonable (could be higher, could be lower). Thus if the initial print run was 10,000 copies with a unit price of 6.00, the publisher had to put down $60,000 with no guarantee of a single sale.
Next, the creation of the book. Again, depending on the publisher and complexity of the book, the creation of the page layout and editing costs can vary widely. Costs again can vary widely--probably from a low of about $3 (possibly lower for a very simply formatted book) to about $6-7 a page for more complicated books. I've only worked on one code book, and it was definitely more complicated than say an academic monograph. If editorial input (quality control, writing editing, code checking, etc) is included, that can be far more than $3 a page. We'll assume this book was not edited, and that it cost the publisher $6 a page to do the production work. Book is 660 pages = $3960. Another often unrealized cost is the creation of an index. I would think many computer programmer types would be able to create their own, but for an academic monograph, the creation of an index by a professional indexer can run upwards of $4 a page too.
The link is down, but I think the author received two payments of $6000 for an advance? $12,000 cost for the publisher.
I'm not even going into the costs of warehousing, shipping & returns, sales/accounting, and marketing. Too difficult to quantify without knowing more details. Here's a question though--do you know how much space 10000 copies of a 700 page book (weighing 2 lbs each according to amazon) take up? I would estimate it takes up about 20 full sized warehouse palettes.
Ok, so so far we have a minimum of about $75,000 (60,000 print + 4000 production + 12000 advance) in expenses for the publisher before a single book is sold. Making ~$20 per copy, the publisher has to sell almost 4000 copies just to break even.
You really expect publishers to shell out 70k, 80k -- including large advances -- and then only break a profit after selling 10,000 copies. Most small publishers sell books that never sell that many copies in a lifetime!
(I'd be happy to discuss further -- this IS a rather simplistic breakdown, and the numbers are different for smaller print runs, etc)
I've worked for several publishers over the years, and even in cases where the author keeps the copyright, the publishers is usually granted the enforcement rights, and other portions of the rights. For instance, one would not expect an author to be forced to defend his copyright in court.
I looked at a contract that was executed several years ago:
Check the italicized portion:
1.0:called the work, hereby grants and assigns to the Publisher the exclusive world publishing rights of the work including the sole rights to translations, selections, expansions, abridgments, as well as all electronic production and reproduction thereof, and the Publisher agrees and has the exclusive rights to publish or reproduce the work during the continuance of the copyright ...
9.0: That the Author agrees not to publish--or permit to be published without the written consent of the Publisher--any other book on the same subject written or edited by the Author that will injure the market made for this book, nor to publish or cause to be published any other edition of this book revised, corrected, abridged or otherwise without the written consent of the Publisher.
In the case of every publisher I have ever worked with (and from dealing with hundreds of authors), this has literally NEVER been an issue -- the author requests rights back from the publisher, and he or she gets them 99% of the time. Literally, I don't think I've ever heard of a case of a publisher not following the author's wishes (and I've dealt with a number of authors who were switching publishers with a revised/second/third/fourth/etc edition of their book).
Speaking as a someone with experience in the small academic publishing world, publishers take big risks with signing authors and issuing advances. If the books never materialize, there's actually very little most publishers can do. ie, you have to eat the 10k or whatever, as any law suit would be expensive and uncertain. Thus the extreme legalese.
A few points from the article:
The retail price (RRP) of Beginning Ruby is $40 (give or take a penny) but my publisher, Apress, makes a varying amount per book – I don’t know why.
Very simple -- publishers sell books at widely ranging discounts, from a low of about 20% to a single bookstore, to maybe 40% to wholesalers, to maybe 60% to amazon. Yeah, so for that $40 list price on Amazon, Amazon probably only had to pay < $20! (Yeah, publishing really isn't as highly marked up by the publishers as it might seem!!)
(About an advance> The only advantage to you is that if your book bombs and doesn’t even sell enough copies to pay back the advance, you (usually) don’t have to give the publisher back a penny.
I've never heard of authors having to pay their advances back if their books bomb or don't materialize. I'm sure it happens with bigger publishers and bigger advances, but most of the time the publisher can't do much.
On the royalty statements above, you should see references to “Licensed Rights.” My first editor told me that these are payments you receive for foreign versions of your book, for inclusion on systems like O’Reilly Safari, and “similar.” I’ve asked a couple of times now but I’ve never found out what these amounts are specifically for and I’m not aware of any translated editions of Beginning Ruby.
Often times these fees are for translations or rights to use small segments. For instance if a professor wants to use one chapter but not the whole book, that might be a small licensing fee. Or if somebody wanted to translate the book into Macedonian, we might charge them $500, which is split 50/50 between the publisher and the author.
Now, I wasn’t particularly
Fair enough--I apologize for anything I misinterpreted in the discussion.
Here's what comes through on your posts (and my guess why you were modded troll)--you act as if you know better than everybody else. You believe that you know what good music is (by acting as if the question is simple and saying others don't have "aural taste buds" as good as yours). Your mini-TV rant is classically parodied by the onion.
"Good music is good music" (etc) -- well who decides that? You seem to waver from your statement of "what's popular!" Believe it or not, standards over time DO change. Heck, again believe it or not, reasonable smart people can disagree about what good music is! Like I said in a different post, I'm a big believer in the latin phrase de gustibus non est disputandum -- there's no disputing taste!
Umm, why is it great that I've never owned a TV?
I figured you wanted to be praised, else why mention it after trashing television as a medium? Or why say you want to "limit" passive entertainment -- again, you sound as if you know best, and other people should just act like you, or listen to you.
~shrug~ maybe you DON'T actually feel like this, but it's sure as heck how your posts come across! I don't think you deserved the troll mod, but I can see how it happened.
I guess it was a combination of bad acting+bad dialog that really got to me in *some places*. There definitely WAS good acting and good dialog--I thought G'kar and Londo were real highlights.
Sinclair is an example of a character who made me wince most of the time he talked.
You know that's a good point (and sad). I guess the moral is never underestimate corporate ineptitude!
I don't understand why people think Fox would WANT to kill it though? I just don't understand the logic. There is of course the inestimable fact of corporate ineptitude, but a conspiracy to kill Firefly seems farfetched to me.
Serenity was positively reviewed. It didn't fail because of bad reviews imho. If it was so mismatched and such a failed "mashup" I don't think it would have been positively reviewed.
My point in noting that Fox and Universal were both involved with the franchise in different ways was to say that two different mega media corporations both failed to gain traction. Do you remember the weeks leading up to Serenity's release? With all the word of mouth and internet fervor, many fans were already talking about reviving the series based on the movie, or what kind of sequels could be produced...
I was going to respond at greater length, but with your profession of hating tv, I thought I might link to the onion as well: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694
Art is art and entertainment is entertainment. The two don't always meet! There was (is) a school of avant guard musical thought that music should be written to be enjoyable only those people who truly understand music theory--not just the unwashed masses. Thus you get music that sounds like crap to 99% of people, and britny spears bubble gum pop that is popular. People are entertained by Britney--so what? For every Milton there's a 100 street poets who entertained with vulgar rhymes, etc. High and low, both valid. Just because YOU personally don't like something you see on tv, why is that so bad?
It's really great that you've never had a TV, but I guess my real question is--if you're so ignorant of what's on TV, why are you commenting as if you were an expert of what's on?
I disagree.
Yes, Fox perhaps did Firefly a disservice by playing the episodes out of order. I thought Serenity (pilot) was a boring episode personally. I had a few friends over to watch it when it actually aired, and not one of them cared to watch anymore Firefly. Interesting how many Firefly fans talk about train job and the Mal-kicking-into-the-engine scene as the scene that sold them, yet also talk about how vital the boring pilot was? Shrug. I'm not going to argue that the situation on Fox was ideal, but the belief that it failed SOLELY because Fox screwed them over, and that had Fox just does one or two things differently, all these fans (who again, failed to show up to a heavily promoted movie) would start watching just seems absolutely ludicrous.
In any case, few (any?) series had as strong a word of mouth campaign. Firefly had excellent DVD sales. It had nerd fandom almost universally singing its praising.
When push came to shove, the viewership failed to rise when it was on TV, and didnt bother to see the movie.
As far as the movie goes, the real problem was trying to cater both to the casual crowd and the fans. The movie's plot was half a retelling of some of the tv series and half a completely new story, so it ended up being a mashup that failed to truly cater to either.
So your argument is that because of plot technicalities, the true fans didn't show up at the theaters, and people who would go to a random science fiction movie didn't either. I'll tell you why the random science fiction viewers didn't show up -- "I am to misbehave." So. Lame. In any case, your review seems odd given the highly positive reviews the movie got...
So was what I wrote just over your head or what? How does the fact that Fox aired episodes in a different order than intended make a movie--by Universal!--a complete box office failure?
Agreed.
Joss Whedon's stuff tends to appeal to very niche demographics. This is as true of Buffy+Angel as it is Firefly/Serenity as it is Dr. Horrible.
Chances are if you like one Joss thing, you like most Joss things!
I think a lot of people were turned off by the dialog and lingo in Firefly, but if you were more used to Whedonisms, it sounded more natural.
So what did you learn from BSG?
Unfortunately it was also very low on the "good dialog" meter. Never understood how people could comment favorably on the character dialog on B5.
Don't get me wrong--I loved the show (at least seasons 2-4), but I found the dialog very wince-inducing in many cases. One of my pet peeves...
I wouldn't say that's quite fair.
Why do people prefer an original piece of artwork over a copy? A first edition book over a mass market one.
Why do people prefer a local grown tomato over one imported from another continent?
Why do people prefer a handwoven persian rug over a mass produced one? Or an authentic tribal artifact over a copy?
There are lots of aspects to ownership besides the form or function of an object.
Vaguely along these lines, to quote Spock: "Having is not so great a thing as wanting. I know it isn't logical, but it is very often true."
Other than Doctor Who (which I like despite the problems, not because of them), every single series I've named is far more solid, far less fluffy, than Star Trek. And even Dr Who is well below ST fluffiness.
Yet the problem is with all those shows is that they suck! :p
I say that tongue in cheek so as not to start a flamewar. I DO hate Dr Who and find it completely unwatchable, but I'm also a big fan of the latin de gustibus non est disputandum -- there's no disputing about taste. I'm fine with the fact that other people like stuff I don't, etc, I just wanted to note that lack or excess of technobabble does not make or break a show's enjoyability. It's characters and plots that matter--even in s.f.
Look, Firefly was cancelled because it was watched by few people. Yes, the DVDs ended up selling well and it became a cult classic for a niche group of people.
Joss even got his shot with the Serenity movie--which failed to break even! I do partially blame the shitty trailers (really--who thinks "I aim to misbehave" sounds cool??)
Face it. Firefly was not popular. The series was not popular, and the movie was not popular. To show you just how unpopular Serenity was--Star Trek Insurrection (as an unabashed trekkie I dont hesitate to call it complete garbage!) made over 1.5 as much money as did Serenity. That's just sad!
So yeah, blame people for not appreciating Joss's wit, blame Fox for not promoting the show how YOU would have promoted the show, but the long and short of it was, the viewer base wasn't there and never materialized. Fox didn't make money on it, nor did Universal. End of story.
Are you just now discovering this divide between high and low culture? Are you really trying to claim that entertainment for entertainment's sake is a new thing (or that TV as a medium is somehow different from others)?
I'm honestly confused as to what your point is.
Where's the info that the patent covers technology used in 2nd generation Priuses?
I hadn't heard the phrase Dancing Pigs problem before...not bad.
I'm not sure why you're marked as a troll...but...
-I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody. I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody. I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody...
surely this is a configuration issue?
-What's that? The mounted ASIP resource disappeared for a few seconds and now everyone's trying to reconnect? At once? And their workstations are beachballed until the share comes back, even though they have no open resources on it?
This at least is totally fixed in 10.6 -- no more beachballs. Using 10.4 and 10.5 if I forgot to disconnect from network shares at work, that evening at home I would randomly get "Disconnected from share xyz" messages...sometimes 30 minutes later, sometimes an hour, etc. Now it's instantaneous.
I pretty much agree with everything you say.
The only point I would try to make is that most malware/attacks today seem to require some level of user involvement in terms of downloading and running a program, running an email attachment, etc. It's not like a few years ago where just by being connected to the internet you could immediately get infected (though these attacks do still occur as you mention)
Nothing stops these same kind of "PEBKAC" attacks from working on linux too. If a user is going to download an EXE because they got a greeting card on windows, I doubt they would hesitate to do something similar on linux.