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grauwulf the other day, in which he kept saying he didn't understand why I was so upset with Amazon for acting like a big corporation. I am terrible at arguing in general, and I'm still not too clear on the DRM issue that was the other half of my irritation, as I keep seeing people say that it's Amazon-mandated, but there appears to have been an Amazon statement some time ago saying that they no longer mandate DRM. Of course, they also made a statement last Monday that evil Macmillan was "forcing them to capitulate" because they (Macmillan) had a monopoly on their own products, and since then they (Amazon) have completely failed to do anything else that looks like "capitulation" up to and including re-listing any of the books they pulled from sale. But in any case, this is the kind of thing I'm worried about:
Part 1 (which is very long, but worth reading, I think): The problem with loss-leader art distribution models, with illustrations from the music recording industry. Actually, this also largely explains why I often buy from places like Amazon rather than going into bookstores that tend towards more mainstream audiences. More on this later.
Part 2 (and this is nice & brief): The agency model outlined, & why you can't judge the production cost of an e-book as already covered by the print edition.
So, well... you've seen my bookshelves. I own a lot of books, and read more. Very few of them are bestsellers, and most of the bestsellers on my shelves were gifts or hand-me-downs and not bought by me. I don't excessively care for all the aspects of big business publishing, even given my limited knowledge of it (although, really, the more I hear about the general levels of ignorance as to how publishing works as an industry... let's just say that I can't remember a time I didn't know things like the fact that authors don't generally get to pick their cover art.) But there aren't a lot of alternate models that will allow the kind of books I want to read to exist. Numerically, most of my favorite books aren't that profitable; within their publishing house, they're sponsored by the bestsellers so that they can get the same editorial and packaging services too. And the publishers are betting that a few of the not-like-everything-else books will turn out to be unexpectedly popular, and they'll benefit. But even so, good books are rejected all the time for not being "marketable."
Thus far, Amazon has actually been a great help in making small-demographic books possible to market and to obtain, and the fact that they've combined two steps of the traditional distribution network and are thus able to reduce their prices doesn't hurt. This is why I've bought from them in the past; they almost always actually have everything I'm looking for. However, the e-book model they're trying to push is setting up to undercut the profit from the publishers (whether it be by selling artificially cheap e-books to people who might otherwise have bought hardcovers, or whether they're just trying to tell the publishers how much it costs to produce a book) and thus endanger the kinds of books I want to read, and those that I would eventually like to be able to sell. That, and I've been seeing increasing numbers of people coming out of the woodwork to say that one reason Kindle e-books are so cheap is that they appear to be run through a fairly poor converter without subsequent copy editing, and end up with bizarre format errors like line breaks every time something is italicized. (Can any of you with Kindle-book experience speak to that one?)
---
At any rate, there is much of the snow, and beginning to be much of the cold (although we continue to have heat!!) and I promise to stop harping on this and talk about something different next time. In fact, several other potentially boring entries have failed to be posted throughout the day because I had not finished with this one. Onward and upward!
grauwulf the other day, in which he kept saying he didn't understand why I was so upset with Amazon for acting like a big corporation. I am terrible at arguing in general, and I'm still not too clear on the DRM issue that was the other half of my irritation, as I keep seeing people say that it's Amazon-mandated, but there appears to have been an Amazon statement some time ago saying that they no longer mandate DRM. Of course, they also made a statement last Monday that evil Macmillan was "forcing them to capitulate" because they (Macmillan) had a monopoly on their own products, and since then they (Amazon) have completely failed to do anything else that looks like "capitulation" up to and including re-listing any of the books they pulled from sale. But in any case, this is the kind of thing I'm worried about:Part 1 (which is very long, but worth reading, I think): The problem with loss-leader art distribution models, with illustrations from the music recording industry. Actually, this also largely explains why I often buy from places like Amazon rather than going into bookstores that tend towards more mainstream audiences. More on this later.
Part 2 (and this is nice & brief): The agency model outlined, & why you can't judge the production cost of an e-book as already covered by the print edition.
So, well... you've seen my bookshelves. I own a lot of books, and read more. Very few of them are bestsellers, and most of the bestsellers on my shelves were gifts or hand-me-downs and not bought by me. I don't excessively care for all the aspects of big business publishing, even given my limited knowledge of it (although, really, the more I hear about the general levels of ignorance as to how publishing works as an industry... let's just say that I can't remember a time I didn't know things like the fact that authors don't generally get to pick their cover art.) But there aren't a lot of alternate models that will allow the kind of books I want to read to exist. Numerically, most of my favorite books aren't that profitable; within their publishing house, they're sponsored by the bestsellers so that they can get the same editorial and packaging services too. And the publishers are betting that a few of the not-like-everything-else books will turn out to be unexpectedly popular, and they'll benefit. But even so, good books are rejected all the time for not being "marketable."
Thus far, Amazon has actually been a great help in making small-demographic books possible to market and to obtain, and the fact that they've combined two steps of the traditional distribution network and are thus able to reduce their prices doesn't hurt. This is why I've bought from them in the past; they almost always actually have everything I'm looking for. However, the e-book model they're trying to push is setting up to undercut the profit from the publishers (whether it be by selling artificially cheap e-books to people who might otherwise have bought hardcovers, or whether they're just trying to tell the publishers how much it costs to produce a book) and thus endanger the kinds of books I want to read, and those that I would eventually like to be able to sell. That, and I've been seeing increasing numbers of people coming out of the woodwork to say that one reason Kindle e-books are so cheap is that they appear to be run through a fairly poor converter without subsequent copy editing, and end up with bizarre format errors like line breaks every time something is italicized. (Can any of you with Kindle-book experience speak to that one?)
---
At any rate, there is much of the snow, and beginning to be much of the cold (although we continue to have heat!!) and I promise to stop harping on this and talk about something different next time. In fact, several other potentially boring entries have failed to be posted throughout the day because I had not finished with this one. Onward and upward!
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-07 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-07 05:25 pm (UTC)Nobody that I've heard is arguing against e-books, or saying that it's not a good and up-&-coming technology; it's just a question of whether it's the retailer's right to tell the company that *creates* the books how much they can sell for. It's reasonable for the consumer to do such a thing, by choosing whether or not to buy the books, but having the retailer make that decision based on what price they'd like to charge (rather than actual production costs) is not going to help anyone but Amazon, and not even them in the long run if they dilute the quality, or convince the customers that e-books shouldn't cost enough to pay all the behind-the-scenes people it requires to put together a good book.
Of course, the apolitical part of me is curling up and whimpering because I've put so much thought into this... :/
Have you got any opinions on the proofing & readability of Kindle book files? I've heard a lot of bad reports recently, and I don't know if it's just the people who are irritated by it speaking up at once, or if it's a sporadic problem (maybe depending on what format the files were converted from?) and some people haven't run into it.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-07 05:43 pm (UTC)Yes, I've seen a few format issues but they are so minimal as to be laughable when they are being touted as "issue-matic". They are not. The main formatting problems I've encountered are an occasional hyphen in a proper name and quoted dialogue being run into one paragraph rather than two. I've seen much much worse in some of the independent print publishers, unfortunately.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-07 05:47 pm (UTC)So have I, and it drives me nuts. It's good to know that not all the Kindle editions seriously flawed, then; the particular examples that I've heard described did sound quite bad.