Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
The problem is that distributors exist, and are a huge part of the book business.
|
Distributors exist in other businesses and the producers can still control who sells what and when. Physical object or not, manufacturers restrict the minimum selling price of products all the time. That is even the fig leaf the Price Fix Six are using to justify their scam. The physicality of a product is irrelevant. There are lots of things the publishers could do there; if they lack originality, they can aways copy other industries.
If nothing ese, the publishers can window the releases to support certain channels over others, just as the music and video industries window their releases.
Nothing stops the publishers from giving bookstores a two-week or even 30-day window when they can sell the books at close to list before letting them flow to discounters. And it might even *increase* their revenue.
It is disingenuous at the least for the big publishers who created and maintain the volume-discounts policies that are squeezing bookstores, big and small, out of the market and that are reducing shelf space for mid-list and back-list titles, to now sit back wringig their hands, pretending they're innocent bystanders with no responsability for the blood-letting and their own travails.
It is like the old joke about the criminal who kills his own parents and then begs for mercy from the court because he is an orphan.
Feh!
Cry me a river!
The glass tower publishers *created* the current retailing model by action and inaction. They can change it whenever they choose to.
They choose *NOT* to because, for all their avowed fear of Amazon or the loss of ebookstores, they are more afraid of change.
To say they can't afford to do anything is to gloss over that they can afford to do nothing even less.
They are simply cowards frozen with fear watching the ship they're steering heading for an iceberg and they can't be moved to even rearrange the deck chairs.
They are not victims, here.
They are the first movers and inciters.
They are the architects of their own fate.
If they should actually vanish they'll not be missed when the smaller, nimbler, ebook-first New Publishers replace them.
The article is full of publisher spin and misinformation, the biggest being that the fate of publishing is tied to B&N, B&M bookstores, and the NY glass tower publishers. It isn't.
Rather, they are all the past.
They could still be saved if the publishers deigned to actually act and accept some small term pain for long term gain but they choose not to do anything but moan and complain. And since inaction is the most assured way to become history, the glass tower gang is well on its way to irrelevance.
They'll not be missed.
Publishing will have a prosperous publishing future regardless of what happens to the old guard. It may not be a Manhattan future but that would hardly be a disaster.