I agree, Valentine's day chocolate is generally awful. If you want to do it right, go to a real chocolatier and get a box of their specialty.
The funny thing is that my wife asked me last year, "Why do you keep getting me this awful Belgian stuff?" Apparently she likes the cheesy heart-shaped Russell Stover "chocolates". Hey, I'm not going to complain. They're like 1/3 the cost, and if it's going to make her happier, bonus.
The premise of the article is not a fraud-- just that, in this particular battle, Macmillan won. Macmillan has private owners (in Germany) who decided that this fight was worth having, right now, because, as they saw it, the future of electronic publishing depended on it. If that meant that the company was going to suffer for awhile, that was OK, because caving in to Amazon meant their business model and price structuring would have to change very dramatically.
If Macmillan had been a public company, this may have turned out differently, as you'd have shareholders screaming for the boardmembers' heads. It seems to have been a tactical mistake on Amazon's part to go after Macmillan first. It turns out that Macmillan was willing to feel the pain for longer than Amazon was.
I'm all for there being more scientists paid to seriously look at the problem. The thing that we have to be wary about is India just saying that they're going to do this, and really, just generating a bunch of contrarian bunk so that they can continue to operate as-is, regardless of what the real data says. Given that the announcement is coming from a politician, I am skeptical. But another, independent climate group? I can only see that as a good thing.
Yes, but is this because Chinese goods are inherently bad, or because there is a correlation between goods made in China and manufacturers looking to cut every last dollar of cost? If the only tools that are still economic to make in the US are the pro-quality top-of-the-range ones, then of course the US tools are going to appear better compared to the competition.
I think you're right here-- the U.S. is only competitive where the quality of the item is more important the cost of manufacturing it. A niche market. The U.S. cannot compete with China when China essentially pays slave wages, so the whole cheap tool market just evaporates here.
On a side note, I like Wiha Tools. All of the tools that I own from them are made in Germany, although I think they also do some manufacturing in Poland and Vietnam.
The stuff sold in the misc tools section of the supermarket is absolute garbage. Drivers with heads that strip themselves. Wha?!
Publishers have a firm grasp on the real world*. What they're hoping is that you won't be bothered to go to the used bookstore to get that book. Or even when it is convenient (like Amazon Marketplace), you are too impatient to wait. So far, the sales figures seem to bear this out. Convenience wins.
In music, of course, this revolution has come and gone, but-- I don't like downloading MP3s. I buy CDs, a good chunk of those used, either online or at the place down the street. I think of this as an 'automatic backup' of sorts. My friends, particularly the ones still in their 20's, think I am insane. "But dood, yo can get itoonz in like one click!" they say. Those are the people who will probably buy an e-book. They can buy it while they're on a bus or something. Very convenient.
* In publishing, not only do the big publishers know exactly how their stuff is selling (like what is sold, what is returned, what is stolen, what enters the second-hand market...), but they buy information they don't have so they know what their competitors are doing, too (e.g., a company called Monument Information Resource sells this). But not just that... publishers also occasionally sample bookstores to get a third view of that data. And, of course, there's lots of fraternizing between companies because employees switch jobs all the time. Anyway... they know what's going on, even at the piracy end. They are very clued into this by now.
If the LHC was designed properly, run the friggin' thing. If not, fix the friggin' thing.
Did you RTFA? That's exactly what they're doing. It takes time to come up with a proper fix, but while you're coming up with something, why not use the thing? Even at a fraction of its energy, the LHC is the most advanced accelerator in the world. It would be a shame to just let it sit there.
Frankly, I'm a little sick of the "outrage" every time something doesn't go as planned. Since when does the universe have to play nice all the time?
Science, by its very nature, deals with the unknown. We're at the point now where it looks like we're going to have to assemble thousands of experts, using billions of dollars to continue to make fundamental discoveries. If any of us had a road map, I assure you that we'd use it. This means that sometimes, we spend all that time and energy and hit a dead end.
But here's the cool part: dead ends are sometimes better than confirming what we already knew. There was an interview with a theoretical physicist on the radio the other day, and the interviewer asked him what his worst fear and greatest hope for the LHC was. He said, "They're the same thing. We find out that we were completely wrong about something." This is simultaneously frightening and exhilarating, and it's what makes fundamental research so exciting.
Well, I can't speak for the rest of the country, but until just now, I never heard a single Challenger joke. To me, that kind of joke has an equivalent tastelessness as jokes about soldiers who die for their country. It makes light of a very great sacrifice.
I was the same age. We were all herded into the 2nd grade classroom to watch it on the new TVs they had installed in the corner of each room. Unlike you, though, the teachers did not hide their dismay from us. I think they were too shocked to "think of the children". I remember a lot of people crying, and the principal gathered the entire school in the lunchroom to explain what happened. As an fledgling space nut (I was building model rockets with my dad), this event had a profound effect on me. Columbia was not nearly as disturbing, but by then I was an adult, and I better understood the risks. I think the Challenger disaster was an end-of-innocence for a lot of people, me included.
"all manufacturing costs from editing to paper costs to distribution, as well as storage, record keeping, billing, publisher's offices, employee's salaries and benefits."
You're right, I don't have access to all the cost information. It's not my job. But let's break it down:
editing cost-- still there
paper cost-- gone
distribution cost-- smaller, but still there (oh wait, servers run on teh magic of the Internets! I forgot!)
storage-- mostly gone (no returns anymore), but still no magic Internet dust to run your data center
record keeping-- still there
billing-- still there, and more complex; books are often a large collection of sub-licensed works (this is the part that I write software to manage); you have to have permissions agreements for those copyrights, separate from print agreements, which means you need to pay people to negotiate those agreements
publisher's offices-- yes, we still have offices
employee's salary and benefits-- yes, we still pay our employees, and we need to pay the people who pay the employees (HR, A/P, and HR systems we subcontract)
You can see that there isn't much to trim.
the books you are publishing are edited electronically and sent to the printing machines electronically; the "new stuff" consists of a single conversion program that takes the electronic format you use for editing and proofing and converts it to the e-book format you're going to be distributing
It is much more complicated than this. The author hands us a manuscript in something (anything really). Editorial works on this in a word processor, usually Word. This is handed to Production, which typesets using page-layout software. This could be anything from LaTeX to Quark or InDesign, depending on the title. Mostly, this part is making the book readable, inserting art, etc. This produces print-ready PDFs that go to the printer. Digital typesetting is faster than moveable type, sure, but it still takes weeks to months. Don't think about the $4.99 paperback at Wal-Mart; think about the 4-color coffee table book, or the 4-color chemistry textbook. Making these things is hard.
The e-book process goes all the way back to the handoff between Editorial and Production. Why? Because the output of a traditional Production department is a PDF for print. e-readers are a completely different beast. For one, artwork is tricky. Does it look good? Do we have rights to distribute it electronically? Same goes for other poems, short stories, essays, maps, etc, that we sub-license. Every single page of every single e-book must run past at least one production person. The end-result is an e-book that is mostly similar, but almost always different than the printed version. And we'll have to do that for every platform the e-book goes to, dealing with all the little quirks of each one. Production is QA. We still have to do QA, regardless of the medium.
All your costs for returns disappear for e-books; since the seller only gets one 'master', and that's electronic, there is nothing to return
This is true, and getting returns right is very difficult. I don't know what our actual return rate is, but we're always trying to keep it low. FWIW, the guys operating the shredders make minimum wage. Processing is not the huge cost-- it's taking unsold books back and having to recalculate our earnings.
I think that you're greatly mistaken; e-books is perhaps the biggest opportunity for publishers that has come along in decades
I completely agree with you here. By "risky" I mean: it takes a lot of startup capital to move into e-books. In order to make money, the process has to be efficient. If we make a mistake, we end up wasting a lot of money. And, I know Slashdotters hate to hear this, but, if people are sharing our books via Bittorrent, that can have a huge negative effect on our bottom line. How much? We don't know yet, because this industry is new. Digital versions are easy to copy; if we don't get the incentives right, people pirate our books instead of buying them. That may be great for you, but it ain't good for a publisher.
Macmillan is in academic the publishing market, but does not advertise those books under their "trade" label ("Macmillan", formerly "St. Martin's Press" and "Holtzbrinck"). They publish academic stuff under their "college" imprints: "Freeman & Worth", "Bedford/St. Martin's", "Nature", etc. Trade-side publishing is indeed as fickle as you say, but college side is emphatically not. Reputation is important in academics, and so the college side can't afford to be careless. Mistakes happen now and then, but every attempt is made to correct them (e.g., MLA updates).
Why all the hate? Sorry, I'd gladly post a better breakdown, but I don't have one. Also, I don't speak for Macmillan. I'm just am employee. I dislike DRM and the non-tangibility of e-books as much as any other geek. My dead-tree collection is huge, and aside from maybe not having to throw heavy CS books into my backpack, I don't really like e-books.
The whole point here is to learn from the music industry's mistakes. Get the whole supply-chain on the same page, early on, and everybody benefits, including the customer. Macmillan is saying that Amazon's price structure is a losing proposition. Does it really benefit the customer if Macmillan sells books at a loss and then goes out of business? Maybe, in the short term, but definitely not in the long term.
Also, if digitial versions of books aren't getting you new customers, something is wrong.
Yeah, like market saturation. There's not much you can do about that. But when your competitors sell their versions as e-books, and customers show a preference for e-books, you sell them too, to maintain market share.
I am not one of the bean counters, but I do know that trade publishing is highly volatile. Some books make tons of money; some make none or lose money. Publishing is largely a gamble on what you think people might like.
The price in any market is not set on what the consumer thinks is fair, it's based on what they'll pay. If it makes you mad, don't buy it. When the manufacturer sees that they could be making more money by charging a lower price, they'll lower the price.
Well, "value" is a funny thing. It really depends on who you're talking to. For you, yes, it is less valuable. Maybe we lose you as a customer. But for every one of you, there may be two other people who are willing to pay more, for the convenience. I don't handle any of the financial stuff, but I can tell which customers our financial people will be paying attention to. Suffice it to say, paper books aren't going away anytime soon. Maybe in 15-20 years that will be different. But convenience is really the driver here, as with many other markets.
Have a look at this post. There's a nice PDF there that will break down costs for you. The short answer to your question is that printing and distribution aren't a large part of the cost of a book to begin with, and e-books have new costs associated with them. Also given that e-books don't gain us any market-share (rather, it displaces market share we already had), and that we still have to do all of the traditional production alongside the new stuff, e-books really cost us more to make, at least at the moment. Oh, and it should be reiterated-- Amazon takes a huge cut. That ads a lot of cost to a book. To make a $20 paper book into a $9.99 e-book isn't so simple as cutting out the printing and distribution part and then selling the book without those costs. Maybe if we had our own platform.
Moving into e-books is risky at the moment, but the higher-ups tell me that they're looking very carefully at the failure of both the music and movie industries to get digital distribution done the right way. The reason why we got this short respite was that, until very recently, turning a paper book into an e-book at home was a gigantic pain in the ass, and not very useful. That's changing fast.
The marginal cost of production for books is already about as low as it will go. e-books make this almost zero, but it wasn't a huge factor to begin with.
e-books have additional production costs associated with them (formatting for screen, electronic distribution, electronic storage, and yes, DRM), and these are new things that don't have to happen for paper books. The production process for paper books has been refined over many, many years (at least a hundred in the case of Macmillan US), and so costs are pretty low. e-books are new ground, and so right now, publishers are spending money to break into this market. We'll see how costs shake out in the long run.
To give you an idea of the cost breakdown, look here. Diagram is for textbooks; trade publishing is a bit different, but not wildly so. As you can see, freight is a very small part of the cost, and (it's not clear from the diagram) but printing is not a huge contributor, either. It's mostly editorial and administrative fees, author royalties, sub-licensing, and taxes.
(I work for Macmillan, so I am not a disinterested party)
Macmillan's president held our annual company meeting just the other day (before the Amazon dispute) and he explained that the pricing for e-books was probably about to get a little rough. Apple had been courting the publishers for several weeks. Apple carries a lot of clout, and was offering terms that were very attractive to publishers, as it lets them set their own prices, within a flexible window. Amazon, on the other hand, was pushing publishers to sell books at a flat rate: $9.99.
Amazon has been angling to set themselves up as the "Wal-Mart of the web", and with that comes a lot of what Wal-Mart is know for: good and bad. Steep discounts are good for the customer, but generally, not so good for the manufacturer. Now, as someone who writes software to help ensure the quality of our books, I am a bit biased, but books are not the same things as widgets. You can't just churn them out. Even good, reputable authors give you something that needs a lot of polishing. We publish textbooks in my division, so this means that in addition to the standard copy-editing, you also need to do fact-checking, course integration, and lots of design work. It is a labor-intensive process, and each book requires the attention of dozens of people, and tens of thousands of man-hours. Often, these books also come with software. I don't think I need to explain to people here how hard it is to write good software.
Amazon is hard to say no to, because they move a lot of books. But they are cutting profit margins dangerously low for us. At what point do you say no? People like to do their work, but they also like to be paid. Macmillan, so far, has balked at Amazon's price-fixing, and (if I understand correctly) Amazon has been selling e-book versions of Macmillan titles at a loss. Amazon, however, sees the iPad terms as very dangerous, because publishers can sell some books higher, but more importantly, they can sell some lower. Apple can do this, because they're not taking as big a cut as Amazon does. Unlike Amazon, Apple's goal is to sell the platform; Amazon wants to sell the books. So Amazon makes a ton on books, but loses a little on hardware. Apple makes money on hardware, but not much else.
I don't know exactly how it will shake out, but it looks like the Macmillan deal will probably be a turning point for e-books. Amazon is now a sub-licensor of those books, and that means that the quality and success of those books is going to be important to them. We'll see how this turns out. For more on this, I recommend this and this.
I hear that Amazon's customers are "boycotting" books priced higher than $9.99. Ok, I hate "teh big bad corp" as much as anyone else, but come on-- it's not like we find these things laying around and just dust them off and hand them to you. There's no magic. Get real. We have to make these things, and that takes time and money, and hey, we like to get paid, too. I suspect the "$9.99 boycott" is Amazon astroturfing.
FWIW, Macmillan is a privately-held company, so that's why you see them taking a stand, and not one of our competitors. I'm fortunate to work for a private company, because we can actually focus on doing a good job. From my perspective, working here has been far from being a cog in some evil empire.
I am a huge fan of Landon Curt Noll's calc program (known as "apcalc" in Debian/Ubuntu), and it's usually one of the very first things I install on my machine. It's CLI-only, and having it available to my via SSH means that I have a great calculator available to me anytime via my mobile phone. I don't care for RPN; calc lets me write an expression just like how I would on paper, so it is very intuitive. It has a large scientific library, too.
Exactly. These people probably switched to fucking with the radio.
My brother-in-law was recently in a traffic accident because (this is beyond stupid) he was eating a bowl of noodle soup, and he started choking. Yes, soup. With a bowl and a spoon. As you can imagine, this requires two hands.
After hearing that, I'm pretty sure that the only way to really make a dent (no pun intended) on reckless driving is to simply remove people from the equation. People will find all manner of new stupidity to replace the old stupidity.
Not if the opposing lawyer went straight to his client and said "Hey, be sensible here." The lawyer does not tell the lawyers client how they will proceed. It's the other way around. The lawyer interprets the law for the client, and tells them what is reasonable, and what is not. If the lawyer's wages are based on winnings, then the lawyer can also decide that it's not worth his time (i.e., no winnings = no wage). But if a client has the money, and wants to continue to pay despite good advice, a lawyer will happily do your bidding, even if it is futile.
Personally, I'm in favor of imposing reality on people. Lawyers can be assholes for many reasons, but not working for free is not one of them.
Security has to be addressed both at the OS level and at the network architecture level. We can't continue to rely on the good behavior of all of the actors on the Internet. Even if you make all operating systems secure and well-behaved, what's to stop someone from writing something new?
Getting rid of Windows eliminates an entire class of problems, of which network security is NOT one. When I'm bored at work and decide to portscan the spammers, guess which port I see open. Hint: SSH.
Actually, rethinking global addressing schemes is on the table for many next-gen Internet projects I've spoken to researchers about. The reason is that router-table growth is not adequately handled in IPv6, nor is the meaning of an IP address very clear in the current Internet. These are major issues. Have a look at Jerome Saltzer's work on naming and addressing. If you want the short version, have a look here.
Public schooling in the US has a lot of problems, and the foremost of them is that in many cases the children are more intelligent than their teachers
This is a major issue, and I feel that I was very lucky in that I had parents who were active in my education when I came home from school. The worst is when your teachers aren't just stupid, they're vindictive. I [mostly] dodged that one, but my brother, who is both a non-traditional learner and brilliant, was repeatedly singled out and punished by teachers who didn't understand what he was saying. Fortunately he stuck with it, and is now at the point where his employer is paying him just to do his graduate work. Take that, teachers!
There are many good teachers, but they are vastly outnumbered by the mediocre and bad teachers. Given the time it takes to become a teacher, the arbitrary hoops that must be jumped through, the daily work politics, and the relatively low pay, I'm not surprised that good teachers are hard to find. The incentives really are geared toward keeping people who are committed to a life of doing the bare minimum.
My wife and I probably will not send our children to public school when the time comes.
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I agree, Valentine's day chocolate is generally awful. If you want to do it right, go to a real chocolatier and get a box of their specialty.
The funny thing is that my wife asked me last year, "Why do you keep getting me this awful Belgian stuff?" Apparently she likes the cheesy heart-shaped Russell Stover "chocolates". Hey, I'm not going to complain. They're like 1/3 the cost, and if it's going to make her happier, bonus.
The premise of the article is not a fraud-- just that, in this particular battle, Macmillan won. Macmillan has private owners (in Germany) who decided that this fight was worth having, right now, because, as they saw it, the future of electronic publishing depended on it. If that meant that the company was going to suffer for awhile, that was OK, because caving in to Amazon meant their business model and price structuring would have to change very dramatically.
If Macmillan had been a public company, this may have turned out differently, as you'd have shareholders screaming for the boardmembers' heads. It seems to have been a tactical mistake on Amazon's part to go after Macmillan first. It turns out that Macmillan was willing to feel the pain for longer than Amazon was.
You can't award a Peace Prize to Berners-Lee: he's a knight! Didn't you know? He didn't just beat Gopher-- he slew it!
I'm all for there being more scientists paid to seriously look at the problem. The thing that we have to be wary about is India just saying that they're going to do this, and really, just generating a bunch of contrarian bunk so that they can continue to operate as-is, regardless of what the real data says. Given that the announcement is coming from a politician, I am skeptical. But another, independent climate group? I can only see that as a good thing.
Fortunately for us, the General's loyalty is only a chicken away.
Yes, but is this because Chinese goods are inherently bad, or because there is a correlation between goods made in China and manufacturers looking to cut every last dollar of cost? If the only tools that are still economic to make in the US are the pro-quality top-of-the-range ones, then of course the US tools are going to appear better compared to the competition.
I think you're right here-- the U.S. is only competitive where the quality of the item is more important the cost of manufacturing it. A niche market. The U.S. cannot compete with China when China essentially pays slave wages, so the whole cheap tool market just evaporates here.
On a side note, I like Wiha Tools. All of the tools that I own from them are made in Germany, although I think they also do some manufacturing in Poland and Vietnam.
The stuff sold in the misc tools section of the supermarket is absolute garbage. Drivers with heads that strip themselves. Wha?!
Publishers have a firm grasp on the real world*. What they're hoping is that you won't be bothered to go to the used bookstore to get that book. Or even when it is convenient (like Amazon Marketplace), you are too impatient to wait. So far, the sales figures seem to bear this out. Convenience wins.
In music, of course, this revolution has come and gone, but-- I don't like downloading MP3s. I buy CDs, a good chunk of those used, either online or at the place down the street. I think of this as an 'automatic backup' of sorts. My friends, particularly the ones still in their 20's, think I am insane. "But dood, yo can get itoonz in like one click!" they say. Those are the people who will probably buy an e-book. They can buy it while they're on a bus or something. Very convenient.
* In publishing, not only do the big publishers know exactly how their stuff is selling (like what is sold, what is returned, what is stolen, what enters the second-hand market...), but they buy information they don't have so they know what their competitors are doing, too (e.g., a company called Monument Information Resource sells this). But not just that... publishers also occasionally sample bookstores to get a third view of that data. And, of course, there's lots of fraternizing between companies because employees switch jobs all the time. Anyway... they know what's going on, even at the piracy end. They are very clued into this by now.
If the LHC was designed properly, run the friggin' thing. If not, fix the friggin' thing.
Did you RTFA? That's exactly what they're doing. It takes time to come up with a proper fix, but while you're coming up with something, why not use the thing? Even at a fraction of its energy, the LHC is the most advanced accelerator in the world. It would be a shame to just let it sit there.
Frankly, I'm a little sick of the "outrage" every time something doesn't go as planned. Since when does the universe have to play nice all the time?
Science, by its very nature, deals with the unknown. We're at the point now where it looks like we're going to have to assemble thousands of experts, using billions of dollars to continue to make fundamental discoveries. If any of us had a road map, I assure you that we'd use it. This means that sometimes, we spend all that time and energy and hit a dead end.
But here's the cool part: dead ends are sometimes better than confirming what we already knew. There was an interview with a theoretical physicist on the radio the other day, and the interviewer asked him what his worst fear and greatest hope for the LHC was. He said, "They're the same thing. We find out that we were completely wrong about something." This is simultaneously frightening and exhilarating, and it's what makes fundamental research so exciting.
Well, I can't speak for the rest of the country, but until just now, I never heard a single Challenger joke. To me, that kind of joke has an equivalent tastelessness as jokes about soldiers who die for their country. It makes light of a very great sacrifice.
I was the same age. We were all herded into the 2nd grade classroom to watch it on the new TVs they had installed in the corner of each room. Unlike you, though, the teachers did not hide their dismay from us. I think they were too shocked to "think of the children". I remember a lot of people crying, and the principal gathered the entire school in the lunchroom to explain what happened. As an fledgling space nut (I was building model rockets with my dad), this event had a profound effect on me. Columbia was not nearly as disturbing, but by then I was an adult, and I better understood the risks. I think the Challenger disaster was an end-of-innocence for a lot of people, me included.
"all manufacturing costs from editing to paper costs to distribution, as well as storage, record keeping, billing, publisher's offices, employee's salaries and benefits."
You're right, I don't have access to all the cost information. It's not my job. But let's break it down:
editing cost-- still there
paper cost-- gone
distribution cost-- smaller, but still there (oh wait, servers run on teh magic of the Internets! I forgot!)
storage-- mostly gone (no returns anymore), but still no magic Internet dust to run your data center
record keeping-- still there
billing-- still there, and more complex; books are often a large collection of sub-licensed works (this is the part that I write software to manage); you have to have permissions agreements for those copyrights, separate from print agreements, which means you need to pay people to negotiate those agreements
publisher's offices-- yes, we still have offices employee's salary and benefits-- yes, we still pay our employees, and we need to pay the people who pay the employees (HR, A/P, and HR systems we subcontract) You can see that there isn't much to trim.
the books you are publishing are edited electronically and sent to the printing machines electronically; the "new stuff" consists of a single conversion program that takes the electronic format you use for editing and proofing and converts it to the e-book format you're going to be distributing
It is much more complicated than this. The author hands us a manuscript in something (anything really). Editorial works on this in a word processor, usually Word. This is handed to Production, which typesets using page-layout software. This could be anything from LaTeX to Quark or InDesign, depending on the title. Mostly, this part is making the book readable, inserting art, etc. This produces print-ready PDFs that go to the printer. Digital typesetting is faster than moveable type, sure, but it still takes weeks to months. Don't think about the $4.99 paperback at Wal-Mart; think about the 4-color coffee table book, or the 4-color chemistry textbook. Making these things is hard.
The e-book process goes all the way back to the handoff between Editorial and Production. Why? Because the output of a traditional Production department is a PDF for print. e-readers are a completely different beast. For one, artwork is tricky. Does it look good? Do we have rights to distribute it electronically? Same goes for other poems, short stories, essays, maps, etc, that we sub-license. Every single page of every single e-book must run past at least one production person. The end-result is an e-book that is mostly similar, but almost always different than the printed version. And we'll have to do that for every platform the e-book goes to, dealing with all the little quirks of each one. Production is QA. We still have to do QA, regardless of the medium.
All your costs for returns disappear for e-books; since the seller only gets one 'master', and that's electronic, there is nothing to return
This is true, and getting returns right is very difficult. I don't know what our actual return rate is, but we're always trying to keep it low. FWIW, the guys operating the shredders make minimum wage. Processing is not the huge cost-- it's taking unsold books back and having to recalculate our earnings.
I think that you're greatly mistaken; e-books is perhaps the biggest opportunity for publishers that has come along in decades
I completely agree with you here. By "risky" I mean: it takes a lot of startup capital to move into e-books. In order to make money, the process has to be efficient. If we make a mistake, we end up wasting a lot of money. And, I know Slashdotters hate to hear this, but, if people are sharing our books via Bittorrent, that can have a huge negative effect on our bottom line. How much? We don't know yet, because this industry is new. Digital versions are easy to copy; if we don't get the incentives right, people pirate our books instead of buying them. That may be great for you, but it ain't good for a publisher.
Macmillan is in academic the publishing market, but does not advertise those books under their "trade" label ("Macmillan", formerly "St. Martin's Press" and "Holtzbrinck"). They publish academic stuff under their "college" imprints: "Freeman & Worth", "Bedford/St. Martin's", "Nature", etc. Trade-side publishing is indeed as fickle as you say, but college side is emphatically not. Reputation is important in academics, and so the college side can't afford to be careless. Mistakes happen now and then, but every attempt is made to correct them (e.g., MLA updates).
Why all the hate? Sorry, I'd gladly post a better breakdown, but I don't have one. Also, I don't speak for Macmillan. I'm just am employee. I dislike DRM and the non-tangibility of e-books as much as any other geek. My dead-tree collection is huge, and aside from maybe not having to throw heavy CS books into my backpack, I don't really like e-books.
The whole point here is to learn from the music industry's mistakes. Get the whole supply-chain on the same page, early on, and everybody benefits, including the customer. Macmillan is saying that Amazon's price structure is a losing proposition. Does it really benefit the customer if Macmillan sells books at a loss and then goes out of business? Maybe, in the short term, but definitely not in the long term.
Also, if digitial versions of books aren't getting you new customers, something is wrong.
Yeah, like market saturation. There's not much you can do about that. But when your competitors sell their versions as e-books, and customers show a preference for e-books, you sell them too, to maintain market share.
I am not one of the bean counters, but I do know that trade publishing is highly volatile. Some books make tons of money; some make none or lose money. Publishing is largely a gamble on what you think people might like.
The price in any market is not set on what the consumer thinks is fair, it's based on what they'll pay. If it makes you mad, don't buy it. When the manufacturer sees that they could be making more money by charging a lower price, they'll lower the price.
Well, "value" is a funny thing. It really depends on who you're talking to. For you, yes, it is less valuable. Maybe we lose you as a customer. But for every one of you, there may be two other people who are willing to pay more, for the convenience. I don't handle any of the financial stuff, but I can tell which customers our financial people will be paying attention to. Suffice it to say, paper books aren't going away anytime soon. Maybe in 15-20 years that will be different. But convenience is really the driver here, as with many other markets.
Have a look at this post. There's a nice PDF there that will break down costs for you. The short answer to your question is that printing and distribution aren't a large part of the cost of a book to begin with, and e-books have new costs associated with them. Also given that e-books don't gain us any market-share (rather, it displaces market share we already had), and that we still have to do all of the traditional production alongside the new stuff, e-books really cost us more to make, at least at the moment. Oh, and it should be reiterated-- Amazon takes a huge cut. That ads a lot of cost to a book. To make a $20 paper book into a $9.99 e-book isn't so simple as cutting out the printing and distribution part and then selling the book without those costs. Maybe if we had our own platform.
Moving into e-books is risky at the moment, but the higher-ups tell me that they're looking very carefully at the failure of both the music and movie industries to get digital distribution done the right way. The reason why we got this short respite was that, until very recently, turning a paper book into an e-book at home was a gigantic pain in the ass, and not very useful. That's changing fast.
The marginal cost of production for books is already about as low as it will go. e-books make this almost zero, but it wasn't a huge factor to begin with.
e-books have additional production costs associated with them (formatting for screen, electronic distribution, electronic storage, and yes, DRM), and these are new things that don't have to happen for paper books. The production process for paper books has been refined over many, many years (at least a hundred in the case of Macmillan US), and so costs are pretty low. e-books are new ground, and so right now, publishers are spending money to break into this market. We'll see how costs shake out in the long run.
To give you an idea of the cost breakdown, look here. Diagram is for textbooks; trade publishing is a bit different, but not wildly so. As you can see, freight is a very small part of the cost, and (it's not clear from the diagram) but printing is not a huge contributor, either. It's mostly editorial and administrative fees, author royalties, sub-licensing, and taxes.
(I work in publishing)
(I work for Macmillan, so I am not a disinterested party)
Macmillan's president held our annual company meeting just the other day (before the Amazon dispute) and he explained that the pricing for e-books was probably about to get a little rough. Apple had been courting the publishers for several weeks. Apple carries a lot of clout, and was offering terms that were very attractive to publishers, as it lets them set their own prices, within a flexible window. Amazon, on the other hand, was pushing publishers to sell books at a flat rate: $9.99.
Amazon has been angling to set themselves up as the "Wal-Mart of the web", and with that comes a lot of what Wal-Mart is know for: good and bad. Steep discounts are good for the customer, but generally, not so good for the manufacturer. Now, as someone who writes software to help ensure the quality of our books, I am a bit biased, but books are not the same things as widgets. You can't just churn them out. Even good, reputable authors give you something that needs a lot of polishing. We publish textbooks in my division, so this means that in addition to the standard copy-editing, you also need to do fact-checking, course integration, and lots of design work. It is a labor-intensive process, and each book requires the attention of dozens of people, and tens of thousands of man-hours. Often, these books also come with software. I don't think I need to explain to people here how hard it is to write good software.
Amazon is hard to say no to, because they move a lot of books. But they are cutting profit margins dangerously low for us. At what point do you say no? People like to do their work, but they also like to be paid. Macmillan, so far, has balked at Amazon's price-fixing, and (if I understand correctly) Amazon has been selling e-book versions of Macmillan titles at a loss. Amazon, however, sees the iPad terms as very dangerous, because publishers can sell some books higher, but more importantly, they can sell some lower. Apple can do this, because they're not taking as big a cut as Amazon does. Unlike Amazon, Apple's goal is to sell the platform; Amazon wants to sell the books. So Amazon makes a ton on books, but loses a little on hardware. Apple makes money on hardware, but not much else.
I don't know exactly how it will shake out, but it looks like the Macmillan deal will probably be a turning point for e-books. Amazon is now a sub-licensor of those books, and that means that the quality and success of those books is going to be important to them. We'll see how this turns out. For more on this, I recommend this and this.
I hear that Amazon's customers are "boycotting" books priced higher than $9.99. Ok, I hate "teh big bad corp" as much as anyone else, but come on-- it's not like we find these things laying around and just dust them off and hand them to you. There's no magic. Get real. We have to make these things, and that takes time and money, and hey, we like to get paid, too. I suspect the "$9.99 boycott" is Amazon astroturfing.
FWIW, Macmillan is a privately-held company, so that's why you see them taking a stand, and not one of our competitors. I'm fortunate to work for a private company, because we can actually focus on doing a good job. From my perspective, working here has been far from being a cog in some evil empire.
I am a huge fan of Landon Curt Noll's calc program (known as "apcalc" in Debian/Ubuntu), and it's usually one of the very first things I install on my machine. It's CLI-only, and having it available to my via SSH means that I have a great calculator available to me anytime via my mobile phone. I don't care for RPN; calc lets me write an expression just like how I would on paper, so it is very intuitive. It has a large scientific library, too.
When I need to graph, I use gnuplot.
Exactly. These people probably switched to fucking with the radio.
My brother-in-law was recently in a traffic accident because (this is beyond stupid) he was eating a bowl of noodle soup, and he started choking. Yes, soup. With a bowl and a spoon. As you can imagine, this requires two hands.
After hearing that, I'm pretty sure that the only way to really make a dent (no pun intended) on reckless driving is to simply remove people from the equation. People will find all manner of new stupidity to replace the old stupidity.
the opposing lawyer should be disbarred.
Not if the opposing lawyer went straight to his client and said "Hey, be sensible here." The lawyer does not tell the lawyers client how they will proceed. It's the other way around. The lawyer interprets the law for the client, and tells them what is reasonable, and what is not. If the lawyer's wages are based on winnings, then the lawyer can also decide that it's not worth his time (i.e., no winnings = no wage). But if a client has the money, and wants to continue to pay despite good advice, a lawyer will happily do your bidding, even if it is futile.
Personally, I'm in favor of imposing reality on people. Lawyers can be assholes for many reasons, but not working for free is not one of them.
Security has to be addressed both at the OS level and at the network architecture level. We can't continue to rely on the good behavior of all of the actors on the Internet. Even if you make all operating systems secure and well-behaved, what's to stop someone from writing something new?
Getting rid of Windows eliminates an entire class of problems, of which network security is NOT one. When I'm bored at work and decide to portscan the spammers, guess which port I see open. Hint: SSH.
Actually, rethinking global addressing schemes is on the table for many next-gen Internet projects I've spoken to researchers about. The reason is that router-table growth is not adequately handled in IPv6, nor is the meaning of an IP address very clear in the current Internet. These are major issues. Have a look at Jerome Saltzer's work on naming and addressing. If you want the short version, have a look here.
Public schooling in the US has a lot of problems, and the foremost of them is that in many cases the children are more intelligent than their teachers
This is a major issue, and I feel that I was very lucky in that I had parents who were active in my education when I came home from school. The worst is when your teachers aren't just stupid, they're vindictive. I [mostly] dodged that one, but my brother, who is both a non-traditional learner and brilliant, was repeatedly singled out and punished by teachers who didn't understand what he was saying. Fortunately he stuck with it, and is now at the point where his employer is paying him just to do his graduate work. Take that, teachers!
There are many good teachers, but they are vastly outnumbered by the mediocre and bad teachers. Given the time it takes to become a teacher, the arbitrary hoops that must be jumped through, the daily work politics, and the relatively low pay, I'm not surprised that good teachers are hard to find. The incentives really are geared toward keeping people who are committed to a life of doing the bare minimum.
My wife and I probably will not send our children to public school when the time comes.