DOJ suing Apple over ebooks.

[ProfCrash]

The shame of it all is that if the big six publishers accepted the inevitability of change and directed their efforts towards the new opportunities and the radical restructuring that’s required rather than trying to fight, what I believe is a hopeless and misplaced rearguard action, they would have achieved more AND kept the audience with them.

That’s the key, because resisting puts them on the wrong side of the fight. Resisting the shift towards digital distribution and the attendant earthquake in industry structure makes publishers the bad guys. After Agency, suddenly publishers are not the nurturers of talent but the maintainers of high prices, not the finders of new voices but the conniving capitalists, the slick backroom dealers, not the men and women who live for the written word. Their companies are known worldwide for being sued by the US Government and for alleged collusion rather than for being companies with iconic brands and valuable legacies.

This is 100% right on

[silasgreenback]

Originally Posted by stonetools

According to you customers should run to iBooks. In reality, I expect only the techie handful will do that .

In reality, the "techies" that care about DRM would sooner break it than pay extra for a lack of encumbrance. It'd be like paying McDonald's more to not put brussels sprouts in your combo meal.

[stonetools]

Price will matter however if the books are drm free as then customers could buy from non amazon stores if the price was cheaper or they had a better loyalty program or some other incentive. Whilst drm remains though that is not even a remote possibility outside of those that can remove drm.

But the price won't be cheaper. Indeed, even if by some miracle the price is cheaper , what about customer service, Whispersync, cloud services, ability to read on more than one device? DRM is the LEAST of Amazon's advantages.

[plib]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Actually, it doesn't matter to the 99%. Maybe it should, but it totally doesn't .
Run this thought experiment. Let's say Apple says tomorrow,
" We will offer books in the iBookstore DRM free but at the same prices as before, i.e. higher than Amazon ".
According to you customers should run to iBooks. In reality, I expect only the techie handful will do that .

I agree, it probably doesn't matter to them now in the sense that it drives their purchases, but it will if the day comes that they can't read their books because of it. Or the day that they realize they're locked into one store. Then the lid will come off.

It matters to them, a lot more than it does to the techie 1% - they just don't realize it yet.

It also matters to the publishers, because they've locked the majority of the market into a retailer they're afraid is going to eat them for lunch. But I don't have a lot of sympathy for them. They've made their bed, now they can lie in it.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by sabredog

Interesting article

Excellent!

[plib]

Originally Posted by stonetools

But the price won't be cheaper. Indeed, even if by some miracle the price is cheaper , what about customer service, Whispersync, cloud services, ability to read on more than one device? DRM is the LEAST of Amazon's advantages.

I'm confused.

Are you coming to bury Amazon, or to praise them?

[plib]

From the article Sabredog referenced, which should be on every BPH CEO's desk tomorrow morning:

Legacy publishers are in the position they are in because they were successful in an age that valued their corporate skills and in which scale was important and profitable. Agency was about protecting that model, that profit. It was couched in language that suggested it was about protecting the value of writing and the incomes of authors (and to be fair, many of those offering those lines do honestly believe them), but really it was about protecting company revenues and shareholders profits.

Maybe the BPH use the same lawyers and PR spinsters as the RIAA and MPAA?

The definition of insanity is.........

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by plib

Maybe the BPH use the same lawyers and PR spinsters as the RIAA and MPAA?

The definition of insanity is.........

I reckon so...

There is a whole new lawyer specialty dedicated to getting financially fat on frantic rearguard actions by the BPH and their fellow neolithic brethren at the MPAA and RIAA.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by plib

I'm confused.

Are you coming to bury Amazon, or to praise them?

I'm pointing out that going DRM free wouldn't be a magic bullet for publishers. I guess my view is like Scalzi's:

Amazon is not on your side. Neither is Apple, or Barnes & Noble, or Google, or Penguin or Macmillan. These are all corporations, not sports teams, and with the exception of Macmillan, they are publicly owned. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize value. You are the means to that, not the end. The side these companies are on is their own side, and the side of their shareholders. This self-interest doesn’t make them evil. It makes them corporations.

Amazon wants you to stay in their electronic ecosystem for buying ebooks (and music, and movies, and apps and games). So does Apple, Barnes & Noble and Google. None of them are interested in sharing you with anyone else, ever. Publishers, alternately, are interested in having as many online retailers as possible, each doing business with them on terms as advantageous to the publishers as possible. All of them will work for their own ends to achieve their goals. Sometimes, their corporate goals will work in your immediate personal interest. Sometimes they will not.

LINK

Amazon does some stuff I like. The BPHs produce the kind and quality of books that I like ( I like quality nonfiction and biography and I don't see anything like that coming out of a Smashwords and Baen type model). I like Apple too and think that there should be a space for high end, enhanced ebooks which is frankly the future of ebooks.
Frankly I would have preferred the current situation play out rather than the race-to-the bottom model which is what inevitable with Amazon running things.Make no mistake, thanks to the DOJ, Amazon WILL be running things for at least the next 2 years.

[plib]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I'm pointing out that going DRM free wouldn't be a magic bullet for publishers. I guess my view is like Scalzi's:

LINK

Amazon does some stuff I like. The BPHs produce the kind and quality of books that I like ( I like quality nonfiction and biography and I don't see anything like that coming out of a Smashwords and Baen type model). I like Apple too and think that there should be a space for high end, enhanced ebooks which is frankly the future of ebooks.

Frankly I would have preferred the current situation play out rather than the race-to-the bottom model which is what inevitable with Amazon running things.Make no mistake, thanks to the DOJ, Amazon WILL be running things for at least the next 2 years.

Scalzi's quote is just Mom and Apple Pie pablum. It's not news to anyone sensible. If he thinks that the end of agency pricing (i.e. price fixing to protect the incomes of publishers who want to remain firmly wedded to the 1950s) will mean the "end of literature as we know it" then I suppose he's entitled to express that opinion. If he chooses to ignore the fact that there were centuries of "quality nonfiction and biography" before the BPH came into existence, then I'm entitled to give that opinion the significance I think it deserves.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by plib

Scalzi's quote is just Mom and Apple Pie pablum. It's not news to anyone sensible. If he thinks that the end of agency pricing (i.e. price fixing to protect the incomes of publishers who want to remain firmly wedded to the 1950s) will mean the "end of literature as we know it" then I suppose he's entitled to express that opinion. If he chooses to ignore the fact that there were centuries of "quality nonfiction and biography" before the BPH came into existence, then I'm entitled to give that opinion the significance I think it deserves.

I am willing to bet that you can't think of 10 quality nonfiction and biography titles that came out prior to the BPHs. I'm quite certain that you can't find 10 such titles on Baen or Smashwords .
Scalzi's point was that there are no angels on ANY side of this, and you are foolish for thinking anyone of them on on "your" side. They are all on their OWN side and don't you forget it.

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I am willing to bet that you can't think of 10 quality nonfiction and biography titles that came out prior to the BPHs. I'm quite certain that you can't find 10 such titles on Baen or Smashwords.

Seriously???? Do you think that books started with the BPH's?

Thomas Paine --- Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason (all well- written, short, very historically significant, The Age of Reason less so to its own time)

Frederick Douglass -- any of his autobiographies

Henry David Thoreau -- Walden (again, one of the all-time classics; once you finish reading it, read Herman Melville's short story "The Apple-Tree Table") -OR- A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (overlooked, but another classic)

Richard Henry Dana -- Two Years Before the Mast (good, but even better as preparation for reading Melville)

Margaret Fuller -- Woman in the Nineteenth Century (a feminist book by the foremost U.S. woman intellectual; she was also a Transcendentalist)

Sojourner Truth -- Narrative of Sojourner Truth (slave narrative)

Mark Twain -- Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad, Old Times on the Mississippi (Although some of these are longer than the others, they may be the most enjoyable for you.)

J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur -- Letters from an American Farmer (unjustly overlooked)

Henry James -- Hawthorne (criticism/biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Harriet Jacobs -- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (slave narrative)

Mary Rowlandson -- A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (This is pretty short, but I guess it's about as short as some of Thomas Paine's stuff. This is interesting to read and very historically significant.)

Olaudah Equiano -- The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (slave narrative)

Cotton Mather -- Wonders of the Invisible World (Mather argues that Satan walks among us as ghosts, witches, and demons, often in human garb; this work helped fuel the witch hunts)

Benjamin Franklin -- Autobiography (Even though it's all lies, it's very significant.) -OR- Poor Richard's Almanack

Oh... And most of them are available right here on MobileRead.

[plib]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I am willing to bet that you can't think of 10 quality nonfiction and biography titles that came out prior to the BPHs. I'm quite certain that you can't find 10 such titles on Baen or Smashwords .

10 second Google search:

The Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Dream Psychology by Sigmund Freud
The Einstein Theory of Relativity
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The Iliad of Homer by Homer
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Book of Five Rings by Musashi Miyamoto
Tao Te Ching by Laozi
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson
The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Breckenridge Carnegie
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
The Antichrist by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells
The Republic by Plato
The Federalist Papers by Publius
The Complete Aristotle by Aristotle

Wasn't familiar with the Miyamoto but all the rest at least rang a bell. Not sure the Jefferson and Marx efforts should be included, but let's leave them in for the sake of historical significance. To be on the safe side let's add:

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbon
The Guide-book. A Pictorial Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina - Burton
De Bello Gallico - Julius Caesar
Paradise Lost - Milton
On Walden Pond - Thoreau
Confessions of an English Opium Eater - deQuincey
My Bondage, My Freedom - Frederick Douglass
Personal Memoirs - Ulysses S. Grant
A Tramp Abroad - Mark Twain

Now I haven't checked to see if any of the BPH were the original publishers of the above, but I'm fairly certain that "quality" non-fiction, biography, travel, philosophy and political books all existed before they came on the scene - and will continue to do so if they have to leave.

Edit: I see jgaiser beat me to it, with some of the same titles. Just proves the point really.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by stonetools

But the price won't be cheaper. Indeed, even if by some miracle the price is cheaper , what about customer service, Whispersync, cloud services, ability to read on more than one device? DRM is the LEAST of Amazon's advantages.

DRM is never an advantage except for at the library.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by plib

I agree, it probably doesn't matter to them now in the sense that it drives their purchases, but it will if the day comes that they can't read their books because of it. Or the day that they realize they're locked into one store. Then the lid will come off.

It matters to them, a lot more than it does to the techie 1% - they just don't realize it yet.

It also matters to the publishers, because they've locked the majority of the market into a retailer they're afraid is going to eat them for lunch. But I don't have a lot of sympathy for them. They've made their bed, now they can lie in it.

I can see it mattering if people with Kindles want to get the new nook with the light.