Quote:
Originally Posted by haroldgh
Yep. And if you sell your book through a storefront like amazon, barnes and noble, etc, they take care of all that stuff for you. That's what their cut is for.
It's just all BS, and it's going to kill the publishing houses. They're freaking out flailing around trying to protect themselves and doing exactly the wrong thing.
It's analagous to the music industry and MP3s, but even more so. A MP3 file is 5-6MB for a couple minutes of music. You may listen to that song dozens or hundreds of times over the years. It has ongoing utility. A book is 500KB, and you're likely to read it once. Books are both tiny and incredibly consumable.
|
+1
I'm also intrigued by this quote from the
Wired link, especially the part I placed in bold:
Quote:
|
Other outlets are already proving they can sell books for less. Apple recently opened the door for authors to sell their work directly to readers through its iBooks store. Apple takes its standard 30 percent cut, leaving an unheard-of 70 percent for the author. (Amazon offers a cut-out-the-middleman option as well but gives as little as 35 percent to the author.) Sure, the quality of the product might suffer, but with a juicy margin like that, it’s not hard to imagine well-known writers going rogue.
|
I like to ponder a well-known author, say Stephen King, experimenting with digital self-publishing and distributing. Following your very apt analogy with the music industry (and of course the movie industry has traveled this path too), I am reminded of Radiohead's very successful experiment in self-producing, distributing, and selling its first post-recording studio contract album "In Rainbows" digitally via the internet (they followed that with selling physical CDs and LPs as well). Not only did it do well with no recording industry middleman markup, but Radiohead, the artists, allowed their fans, the consumers, to choose their own price, including free as an option! It was at once a giant finger to the recording industry, a victory for musicians everywhere, and a successful experiment and blueprint for how to self-publish (it helped that Radiohead was already hugely successful and popular with a built in fan base, but the point remains).
You are right that the publishing houses are moving in exactly the wrong direction. It is foolish to resist the digitizing of their content. It is inevitable that e-books will grow in popularity and ubiquity. The conveniences they offer are overwhelming once readers get over the sentimental attachment to physical incarnations of books. Publishing houses will adapt or die, just as the music recording industry is doing.
As consumers of books, we have a stake in this game as well, of course. It is in everyone's best interests to see that the ultimate content creators, authors, have a way to earn a living commensurate with the one the lucky ones can make now. Unless you are in the book publishing business, you don't really care if traditional book publishing houses remain when all is said and done. What you care about is ensuring the writer retains control over her work and can be compensated fairly for distributing it to readers. Traditional publishing houses are unnecessary for that to happen. This likely means power is shifting away from publishing houses and brick and mortar book stores and to writers (and perhaps their editors too) and digital content distributors like Amazon and Apple. Once the dust settles -- and eventually it will -- this will likely be a good thing. The world is becoming flatter, in the Thomas L. Friedman sense.