Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Hmmm. Nokia in Finland, Austin, Texas....
|
*sigh*
I did not mean to say that the only valid place to conduct a tech business is in the Bay Area etc. It's more that even in the Internet era, there are certain (sometimes intangible) advantages to geographical concentration. For example, an acquisition editor who can meet a different agent for lunch every day of the week has a huge advantage in culling new talent and making deals over one who has to fly to 5 different cities for 5 different meetings.
Oh, and you can undoubtedly run an efficient business in a major metropolitan area, or an inefficient business in a less expensive region.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by RSE
The publishing business is economically incompetent.
|
So if they had 30% margins, they'd be exploitative fiends; if they have 10% margins, they're incompetent. Got it.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by RSE
They are no more efficient than they were 50 years ago, in a world that is orders of magnitude more efficient doing everything else.
|
Well, I don't have access to anything near the kind of numbers to genuinely compare publishing's efficiency now to its past, or to other businesses. But since they no longer use typewriters and rely exclusively on traditional presses, I'm going to guess that you're exaggerating. Just a little bit.
I can say this much, though:
• It's extremely difficult to be "efficient" in publishing (or almost any media business). With the exception of a handful of big hitters (King, Patterson, Rowling etc), there's no way to really determine what will sell, how much a specific author or title will sell.
• I'm not really sure that publishers would really be any better or preferable if they were as efficient as Walmart.
• A "more efficient" publishing industry would undoubtedly be harsher not just on internal staff (who already don't get paid much) and external suppliers, but on authors as well. (I.e. if you think authors currently get screwed, they'd be far worse off with a "more efficient" publishing model.)
Or to put it another way: there's more to a business than efficiency, especially when dealing with complex personalities and fickle audiences.
As to the "dinosaur" concept, I find this very odd. The publishers got extremely lucky, and had a potentially big and influential retailer (Apple) give them not just exactly what they wanted for the future, but also the leverage to demand the same terms from existing retailers.
Now it is entirely possible that publishers may price ebooks too high. But even so, the publishers are apparently forward-thinking enough to grab the opportunity to completely rework their pricing relationship to the retailers. Moments like these are exceedingly rare, and so far they seem to be making the most of it. They are taking a cut to their short-term profits in order to gain control and protect future profitability. That doesn't seem particularly "dinosaur-like" to me.
Further, while this may or may not apply to you personally, most of the people who refer to publishers as "dinosaurs" seem to want that entire layer to go up in a puff of smoke. So, I tend to view such comments with a touch of skepticism.
And let's face it, ebooks are the future, but over 95% of their revenues today are still coming from paper. They need to continue to make money in order to survive the transition. There isn't much point in focusing on the future, if it pushes you to take actions that ensure you won't survive long enough to see it....