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Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
And the end-user should care about this why? All higher prices do is drive the darknet. Publishers need to sort their pricing models out. There's precisely the same issue with console games and fixed platform-holder charges.
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IMO it depends on the end-user. If all you care about is the present, then I don't think this discussion has anything of interest to you. Personally, I worry about the future. Not the long-term future (I have no idea what publishing will be like in 50 years) but not the short-term future either (I don't expect either Amazon or major publishers to go out of business in the next year or two), but in the future 10-20 years ahead.
That's when I see problems if we decide that publishers aren't entitled to a profit. As somebody said, the current business model has the 'big names' basically subsidizing new authors. If we change that, it'll lower the prices for books by the big names and eliminate the new authors, except for those who self-publish.
Is self-publishing a viable model for all authors? Not IMO. There's too much involved in publishing. I've seen *many* people who are good at what they do, when working for others, fail when working for themselves. Do they become worse at what they do? No, the reason they fail is because running a business takes a wide variety of skills-which they didn't have.
I expect the same is true of authors. They may be good at writing, but how good are they at promoting/advertising? Can they truly proofread their work adequately? I write documentation & the 'best practice' for that is to pass it around-let others proofread your work because they'll catch mistakes that you miss. You're too close to your own work-people see what they expect to see and the author, of course, knows what the sentence is supposed to say.
That's only a couple of examples of the value a publisher adds to an author's work. (It's probably true that not all publishers add significant value-but there's sleaze in every industry.) IMO a publisher does add value, so I think they deserve to earn a profit. The major questions are 1) how much profit is justified and 2) how much profit are they earning?
Until they open their books (assuming they ever do) we'll probably differ in our guesses on the latter. The part that ticks me off is when people look at what the author receives & assume that's the *total* cost of a book, to the distributor. It doesn't take more than a couple of minutes thought to realize how false that is-but that appears to be more than some people are willing to spend.