Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
I'm often astonished at how uncreative and plodding the publishing giants are.  |
For a very long time, they didn't deal with the public. They were like, oh, manufacturers of coffee mugs... sure, everyone had some, and you could buy them anywhere, but who knows or cares how they get made? Obviously some were better quality than others, and some people had specific manufacturer preferences, but mostly, people just used whichever ones were sold in their area.
Do the writers who make funny slogans for coffee mugs get paid? Do the artists of pretty pictures on some of them get paid? Does the public know what kind of contracts they have?
All of a sudden, people are *noticing* fine details, and getting
heat-transfer machines of their own, bypassing all the traditional companies and making their own coffee mugs. (Actually, I doubt CafePress & Zazzle have put any crimps in the sales of BB&B's coffee mugs; the costs are just too high.)
And now they're being told they should sell to individuals, one-on-one, and take feedback from single end-users, instead of selling to distributors who will sell to stores who will sell to customers. Publishers were a B2B industry; the fact that their products were intended to follow a longer chain wasn't directly relevant to them.
I don't blame them for not having figured out how to manage a shift in the whole focus of the industry. (I *do* blame them for trying to grab the rights to all the aspects of the authorial process, even the ones they're not set up to do anything with. Demanding ebook rights when you don't have the ability to support them decently--like, with proofreading--is just asinine.)