Quote:
Originally Posted by Seli
Did they? Did they really buy a supply of ebooks (or licenses)?? That would mean the industry is even weirder than I imagined.
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I would think you would be safe in saying the industry is "weird" right now, period. Because it is in flux and everyone is trying to push their own perception of how the future should be.
Content creators, as represented by publishers, studios etc. supposedly want to move to licensing where the consumer owns nothing, but purchased a license for a one-time viewing, reading, listening on a specific device. Of course when an individual writer, artist, movie star is contacted they may have their own view.
The majority of consumers (from what I read on blogs/forums) still want some form of property rights, licensing leaves them cold. Younger consumers seem to be adapting to the notion of pay once, view once though - we will have to watch how this trend continues to develop.
As has been stated elsewhere on these forums the consumers exact legal rights are still being decided in the courts; various judges are making it up as they go along. In the USA it appears you can be breaking a license by removing DRM, but if you have already paid for the ebook neither the publisher nor the writer are out a cent. This specific court case... don't think one has even been initiated.
Some State Attorneys are looking into Agency 5 pricing, but as to whether Amazon being an "agent" for the publishers when the remainder of the Amazon.com site is a retailer, whether this will stump the state attorneys' investigations into the matter remains to be seen.
Yes. I think you would be quite safe in declaring things to be 'weird' right now. Sort of like going to a theater and seeing an opera performance, comedy, drama and symphony all taking place up on stage at the same time.
But what you are talking about specifically... probably every time Amazon used to sell an ebook for Penguin, etc. they owed the publisher a 'cut', which 'cut' was non-percentage based. So if Amazon wanted to take a loss on an ebook sale that was Amazon's option.
I am just guessing, it could have worked some other way entirely different. Maybe the publishers were/are running their own servers and every ebook comes with its own software-generated license, hidden away in a file in the background, far from the consumer's eyes.
And maybe among twenty publishers there are twelve different ways of doing things - at least under the old scheme of things.