Quote:
Originally Posted by shalym
Last but not least, in my opinion, Createspace is NOT a publisher. They are a distributor for artist's works, and they also offer other services that are paid for separately from the distribution. They take an artist's work and put it into paper, CD and DVD (they also offer services for music and movies).
Shari
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You are absolutely correct.
Createspace is no more a publisher than Lightning Source, Spark, Smashwords, Xin Xii, Kobo, Nook, or KDP. They are just distribution service providers.
A lot of people who should know better keep on conflating distribution services with old-school publishers (like the flap when Overdrive added Smashwords titles to their library services and listed Smashwords as "publisher". Or when the AU/AG crowd rail about Amazon promoting "their" titles when complaining about KDP titles.
These days all the services tradpubs and record companies (nominally) offer in their bundled contracts are available unbundled from hundreds of professional service providers at reasonable cost. It does not make any of them publishers; the publisher is whoever controls the copyright commercially. And those services don't; they're just hired help.
The way it works is those unbundled services dramatically lower the barrier to entry into publishing (books, music, even video games) and lower it most dramatically for the digital formats. The ripples from the ongoing proliferation of these honest service providers are spreading far and wide. They are most noticeable in NorthAmerica and the UK but they are a worldwide change. Music and gaming are ahead of the adoption curve than ebooks but there is no inherent reason why ebooks won't evolve the same way, absent *artificial* constraints.
Artificial constraints like uneven taxes and regulations intended to protect big and entrenched players from smaller players interested in exploiting these new emerging businesses.
Which brings us back to the NYT piece.
In the NY publishing universe it has become pretty much an article of faith that ebooks (and especially cheap ebooks) are a threat to *all* publishers when the on-the-ground reality is more nuanced; the unbundled service providers can be (and are) a threat to biggest of publishers but further down the pecking order they offer opportunities for traditional publishers and many of them can and do use them. For covers, editing, formatting, and especially *distribution*.
Createspace and Lightning Source and the like aren't just for indies; they also serve the smaller tradpubs by helping them keep their backlist in print, by distributing smaller volume releases, by expanding their reach globally.
This is an ongoing reality in music and gaming.
And also in books.
The game is no longer skewed quite as strongly in favor of the giants.