Publishers need to die

[lilac_jive]

Wow, I can see this spiraling out of control fast.

[pdurrant]

Your figures are a bit off.

$5/month from every US income tax payer is not $20 billion a year.

There were just under 139 million income tax payers in 2007. At $60/year, that's $8.34 billion per year, or about 0.6% of total income tax revenue.

US Music sales are over $5 billion a year
US Book sales are over $10 billion a year
US DVD sales are over $20 billion a year

That's at least $35 billion

Originally Posted by Charbax

I am not angry. I am just stating the basic truth.

I suppose some people though, perhaps working in the current publishing business, might feel a bit threatened by my words of wisdom.

[Charbax]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Your figures are a bit off.

$5/month from every US income tax payer is not $20 billion a year.

There were just under 139 million income tax payers in 2007. At $60/year, that's $8.34 billion per year, or about 0.6% of total income tax revenue.

Well I calculated $5 per person and there are 303 million people in the USA. People who don't pay taxes still wouldn't have to pay it, and people paying taxes might thus pay closer to $13 per month in average, based on personal fortune and income.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

US Music sales are over $5 billion a year
US Book sales are over $10 billion a year
US DVD sales are over $20 billion a year

That's at least $35 billion

Yup, but to that you can subtract the money made by all the intermediaries that become irrelevant with the Internet. If you look only at the money made by artists and the money necessary to produce the artistic content, then you will find that the actual artist and production share of that revenue is currently much lower than $35 billion.

I think it's pretty well known that most artists and authors barely touch 5% to 20% at the maximum of that current industrial revenue.

Thus if Obama snapped his fingers tomorrow for a $5 per person tax, the $20 billion would be enough to instantly cover the costs of all of the artists that are active today and many more new artists. And I am not suggesting either that the old systems go away overnight. Music, Book, DVD, TV ads and Cinema sales can continue under the previous copyright system for as long as corporations don't pollute too much selling them.

Regulations should be put in place though so that those $20 billion of the Obama art tax carefully only is channeled to artists and to financing of artists current and future projects. Contractual transfer of these funds to corporations should be made illegal. The artist should be able to hire people to work for him to help him do better content. But in no way should the artist lose that total artistic control.

[Dr. Drib]

Perhaps your thread would be better served with this title:

"Publishing needs to Die."


Don

[pshrynk]

Originally Posted by Charbax

Authors can be paid in advance using the Obama book tax. Simply put, based on the measured popularity and quality of their previous works, when an author is in "writing a new book" mode, he can get an automatic advance payment from the book tax system. Then based on the measured quality and popularity of their work once it's released, it will determine the value of that author if he wishes to dedicate more time in writing mode.

Oh, Dear Ghod!

[pshrynk]

Originally Posted by Charbax

Luckily though, this whole thing can easily get fixed by a simple new law signed by Obama and the other world leaders. Basically, Obama can now snap his fingers and this whole thing will be fixed.

[phenomshel]

Originally Posted by Charbax

The work of copy editing can quite simply be managed by wiki type of collaborative work by all users.

Let there be an infinite amount of versions of each ebook, remixes, rewrites, it's all up to the author which "copy writer" as you call it would be wirelessly invited online to "copy edit" his writing. If that's what you claim is important.

Last I checked, 80% of the revenue from selling books and even a larger % of selling of ebooks goes to publishers and all types of other intermediaries (distributors, Amazon and others). This to me is purely criminal and completely insane.

My money should go 100% to the author, and the author can hire "copy writers" online whatever you call it, can compensate fans for helping him promote his book if he wants. Amazon should have absolutely no cut in the sale of ebooks other than taking a reasonable separate fee whatever they may charge for the bandwidth, hosting and infrastructure of the cloud computing system that they provide.

Well, you could always start doing what my husband did. He not only bought a music CD, he got online, found some arcane formula that calculated the difference between what the CD cost and what the artist actually got from it..and sent the artist a check for the difference. So just send the author a check for the amount you think they're missing for each book you buy.

[Charbax]

Originally Posted by pshrynk

Oh, Dear Ghod!

Web 2.0 can quite simply manage advance money by proven track record of popularity, quality and number of fans. And that Web 2.0 money is going to be financed through a tax that is much more efficient and which basically is the same as a global standardized subscription plan.

How else would you describe technologies of connected ebooks that have eventually wacom touchscreen interfaces, that pull pages from ebooks wirelessly, that allow the user to rate, comment, debate in realtime on any word of any sentence of any book. How else would you describe it than a technology to measure popularity and quality of online content. Thus measure popularity and quality of artists. Thus decide how much money the artist is entitled in advance for working on the next book.

[lilac_jive]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say...I think you may be delusional.


I agree that the publishing industry needs to adapt and change (some certainly are), but what you are suggesting is, well, pretty ludicrous.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by Charbax

You might as well just not pay any taxes then. Smaller government doesn't solve anything. It's pretty much proven fact. Just look at Bush and his gigantic tax cuts to the rich. It didn't solve anything other than to create the worlds worst economic and financial meltdown in history, a melting north pole with rising sea levels, millions killed in the middle-east for the privatization of Oil and a record level of starving people in poor countries.

You right wing libertarian conservatives have had your chance in the last 14 years. Now it's time for the meaningful socialists to take over and fix the problems that you have created.

Boy oh boy! The above conflates so many different things that it's tough to even know where to begin.

I'll simply observe that "right-wing libertarian conservative" is an oxymoron. Bush and crew were certainly "right-wing." They may or may not have been conservative (depending on your definition). They bear absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to "libertarian," though. Violating civil rights left and right, imprisoning folks without trial, foreign military adventures, etc. etc. ad nausem -- let's just say that the vast majority of what the Bush administration did is utterly incompatible with any definition of "libertarian" (small l or Large L) that I've ever heard.

Xenophon

[Xenophon]

I wrote a long reply to the post Charbax used to open this thread. That long reply is back in the original thread, here. I'm cross-linking so interested parties (if any) can find it.

Xenophon

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by Charbax

Web 2.0 can quite simply manage advance money by proven track record of popularity, quality and number of fans. And that Web 2.0 money is going to be financed through a tax that is much more efficient and which basically is the same as a global standardized subscription plan.

How else would you describe technologies of connected ebooks that have eventually wacom touchscreen interfaces, that pull pages from ebooks wirelessly, that allow the user to rate, comment, debate in realtime on any word of any sentence of any book. How else would you describe it than a technology to measure popularity and quality of online content. Thus measure popularity and quality of artists. Thus decide how much money the artist is entitled in advance for working on the next book.

Charbax:

With all due respect, I suspect that all of this would be better described as "If implemented, XXX could YYY" and so on. As written, you present this as a forgone conclusion with no room for alternate views, no room for doubt, and an inevitable outcome. This is not a good recipe for convincing a skeptical audience.

I'll also add, from my admittedly libertarian perspective, that the system you have described (especially if connected up to government oversight and tax revenues!) is an authoritarian dictatorship's wet dream! Just think: we can immediately identify exactly who's reading those dangerous free-thinking/right-wing/left-wing/communist/terrorist/socialist/pro-union/anti-union/conservative/liberal books and articles (I'll call them XXX books hereafter). That'll make it really easy to put them up against the wall after the revolution! And we can identify who's writing those XXX books and articles, and manipulate the system so they don't get paid much if anything -- while the "party approved" artists get the bulk of the money. Old Uncle Joe (Stalin) would be proud!

More seriously, how would you like it if your least favorite politicians (of whichever stripe) were running such a system? Say, George III of England? (I see you've been reading pamphlets by that Thomas Paine fellow... we can fix that!) How about George W. (win a free trip to Gitmo!) Bush? Or Pol (killing fields) Pot? Or even the current Governor (you've got to pay to play) of Illinois? I'm staying away from the 'H' guy to avoid invoking Godwin's law. I'll take the admitted evils of the current system in a heartbeat -- it's only money at stake now, not lives.

Xenophon

[elainevdw]

Originally Posted by Charbax

Authors can be paid in advance using the Obama book tax. Simply put, based on the measured popularity and quality of their previous works, when an author is in "writing a new book" mode, he can get an automatic advance payment from the book tax system. Then based on the measured quality and popularity of their work once it's released, it will determine the value of that author if he wishes to dedicate more time in writing mode.

Well how about that! I wish the taxpaying public would pay me in advance for all the crap I do at my job. I'm quite the popular and efficient employee, don't you know.

Why does putting Obama's name on a totally ridiculous idea make it sound so appealing to people? People get paid for what they produce, not for what they will produce.

As far as publishers go -- they kind of remind me of Dr. Kelso in Scrubs. Everybody hates them because they're jerks, but they're good at what they do and they keep everything running in a way that ultimately serves the public best.

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by elainevdw

Well how about that! I wish the taxpaying public would pay me in advance for all the crap I do at my job. I'm quite the popular and efficient employee, don't you know.

Why does putting Obama's name on a totally ridiculous idea make it sound so appealing to people? People get paid for what they produce, not for what they will produce.

As far as publishers go -- they kind of remind me of Dr. Kelso in Scrubs. Everybody hates them because they're jerks, but they're good at what they do and they keep everything running in a way that ultimately serves the public best.

And since I watch Scrubs, I totally get what you are saying.

"SMILING! I hate smiling."

[Xenophon]

I suppose I should explain something with regard to my last post... The examples I gave of "least favorite politicians" are certainly somewhat contrived and are deliberately over-the-top. What I was trying to get at was this: When considering a government program and trying to decide whether I think it's a good idea, I often find it useful to imagine what it would be like if it was being administered by the politicians and bureaucrats of my nightmares. If it still looks like a good idea then, it's probably worth implementing as a government program. If not, it fails the test.

On a secondary note, if Charbax really wants this "Obama book tax" he's going to have to take a look at changing the U.S. constitution. There's certainly no clause that accommodates such a program as the constitution now stands. O.K., maybe the commerce clause, but even that's quite a stretch -- even after being redefined by the Depression-era Supreme Court.

Xenophon