Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
But they won't continue to write and publish books if THEY don't get paid. I love me some Joe Abercrombie. But he doesn't HAVE to write books. He just can go back to publishing screenplays if he can't make a living writing novels.
|
Who said the author wasn't getting paid?
The publishing industry == all of the crap that traditional paper publishing requires. Big publishing houses that can afford to pay for large print runs up front and thus are unwilling to take a chance on an unknown. They negotiate all of the steps necessary to take an author's manuscript and turn it into a finished, paper copy that you can hold in your hand.
The ebook industry does away with a lot of that. Not all of it, sure, but a lot. Copy editors and marketing will still be required. New jobs will be available for typesetting ebooks rather than typesetting for printing presses. But there's no printing press to run, no up-front cash layout required to generate inventory to sell, no warehouse required to store the books, no shipping costs to get the books out to book stores, no brick and mortar book stores to sell these books to the end user.
The publishing industry is still stuck in the paper mindset. They price ebooks like paperbooks event though they cost a fraction of the cost of a paper book to make. They then try to protect this by using DRM, and they have an old fashioned idea of having to "make up" lost revenue, as if anything were lost.
Here's an idea -- when most (or all) of the middlemen are cut out, the author can sell his books at a lower price while making just as much or more in royalties per sale (because all of those middlemen are now gone). The author makes
more money and is thus incentivized to write more books even as the "publishing industry" is collapsing. And it's perfectly okay for that publishing industry to collapse, because it's based on an outdated business model that no longer applies to ebooks.
That's not to say that all publishers will go away. There's definitely value in having some amount of middlemen, whether it's because an author doesn't want to do all of the legwork himself, or to provide turnkey copy editing and typesetting services, or to convert the book into all of the various different formats and submit it to the various different ebook stores for sale, or whatever. Those publishers will thrive, because they evolved their business model and are not trying to hold on to an outdated model that they somehow feel they're entitled to.
You assume that DRM-free == piracy == authors not getting paid, which has been disproven for years by the music industry.