Quote:
Originally Posted by ezdiy
Everyone polishing their crystal balls. So here's mine:
Lemma 1: Piracy in ebooks is huge issue, it's even easier than music. Virtually all books are one google search away. Not pirating books is truly a consumer choice because I WANT to support the author who writes for a living. Charlie Stross wrote on this issue why "tipjar" schemes are not really workable for career author: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog...no-tipjar.html
Lemma 2: Mainstream authors HAVE TO go through Big5. For editing, organizing events, payola, print, for cash upfront to live off. This is the music record industry all over again. Amazon may skim less, but it has some serious drawbacks. You get no editors, no serious promotion aside from few kindle ads, no nothing. Amazon is what bandcamp is to music.
Lemma 3: Reading is a complete niche. Once you remove school textbook scams, schlick fic erotica, NYT new age self-help bestseller of the year and other generic schlock, reading is not really as big as people think it is. It mostly comes in waves of extremely popular YA franchises like Tolkien, Pratchett, JKR, but it tends to die off just as quick.
The third point is what separates ebooks from music industry. Everyone listens to music and watches TV, so schemes like spotify or netflix are most likely workable. The sheer size of the market can carry a flat rate subscription scheme.
However literature is a niche, and niches in general are far more difficult to disrupt - ebook format itself is perhaps the only disruption.
Perhaps there's hope is that Amazon becomes one of Big6. That is, they start acting more like a publishing house, seriously focusing to attract high roller authors and provide the homebase as other publishers do. All the while acting a little bit more ethical. But looking at their past record, they far prefer to go quantity and automation rather any semblance of human aspect.
And here lies the Catch-22. Amazon is the *only* one who can efficiently combat piracy (through convenience). Yet Amazon is also too lazy to act like a publisher. Meanwhile Big5 publishers are way over their head wrt piracy - they try to compensate for it by unreasonable market gauging - which is extremely self-defeating, as that simply pours even more oil on the issue. |
A lot of good points, but be prepared for the attack of the Amazonians and Never Publishers.
I'm not sure that I would agree that niche is quite the right word for the book market. If it's a niche, it's a really big niche, but yes an order or two magnitude smaller than music and movies. You did miss the fast growing market of audiobooks.
I've given my view of the unique consumer types/markets in the book consumer world before - The words just want to be free reader; The cheap, all you can eat, I don't care what it taste like buffet reader; the read 3 best sellers a year reader; the genre reader; the connoisseur reader to name a few. The problem is that while there is some crossover, readers in one group tend to think that most readers are just like them and that anything that does cater to their group is worse than useless.
I tend to disagree with you regarding piracy. I have yet to see any evidence that piracy is a major issue for book publishers. First off, while piracy does exists for paper books, typically in various 3rd world countries, it's a non factor in markets like the US and UK. So piracy is mostly an eBook thing and eBooks is only around 20% of the book market the last time I looked. Publishers charge what they think will give them the most profit.