Tor delays new-release sales to library ebook supplier Overdrive

[DuckieTigger]

You contradict yourself. That was exactly what I was talking about.

Originally Posted by sealbeater

Oh, am I?

I'm sure they won't. I have no idea what they are going to do. I know what's happening now and I can plot trends.



There should be. Personally I think there is a right to read. As for pirating books, well it was happening long before ebooks were even a thing and it's happening now.




Ok, I enjoyed talking with you. Have fun with your head in the sand.

I am not the one with the head in the sand. You are the one with unrealistic expectations.

You want books freely available for everybody. And still you even acknowledge that writers are trying to make money (won't work for free). That leaves nothing that will be published any more.

Piracy did exist and will most likely always exist. And once it becomes mainstream (as in your dystopian vision), the system will fail. It is far from mainstream right now.

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

You contradict yourself. That was exactly what I was talking about.

How so?

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

I am not the one with the head in the sand. You are the one with unrealistic expectations.

Well, I guess that just depends on your individual reality.

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

You want books freely available for everybody.

Honestly I really do. I think that would be an awesome future. A shining path for all mankind that we are probably going to be too ignorant to walk.

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

And still you even acknowledge that writers are trying to make money (won't work for free). That leaves nothing that will be published any more.

Yea I dunno what they are going to do. I'm glad it's not my problem. I am excited to see how it all shakes out. Arguments like this have been around since the printing press and music scores. Personally I feel free access to information will benefit mankind. I think it's going to happen, one way or another. It already is, in many ways, for those who know and reach for it. There's nothing that any publisher can do to stop it.

EDIT: I realized I never answered your point about creators and money. Well, I was reading Dune not too long ago, and the foreword talked about how he didn't expect it to be a commercial success, he just knew he had to get the story out. That's a real writer, as can be seen by the diffference between Frank Herbert and Brian. The Franks of the world will write regardless and it will be awesome. The Brian will find other jobs and we will all be the better for it.

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Piracy did exist and will most likely always exist. And once it becomes mainstream (as in your dystopian vision), the system will fail. It is far from mainstream right now.

Like I said, I guess that depends on your individual reality and your definition of mainstream. Personally I think if a system can fail, it should. All I'm saying is that this decision, while theorized to have something to do with piracy, will do nothing as usual and the only people affected will be the poor and the non-savvy.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

All I'm saying is that this decision, while theorized to have something to do with piracy, will do nothing as usual and the only people affected will be the poor and the non-savvy.

The honest people that are poor already have options. It is called a public library. A library is not free, but does make available plenty of reading material free of charge that would otherwise be too expensive for the patron.

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

The honest people that are poor already have options. It is called a public library. A library is not free, but does make available plenty of reading material free of charge that would otherwise be too expensive for the patron.

And as I pointed out, this group is the only group this will affect. Personally I find libraries limited in many ways although I believe them to be a valuable resource and the older I get, the more I wonder if it's not deliberately so. What you call "honest", I call "the acceptance of intellectual chains". Public libraries are obviously a chokepoint on the intellectual resources available to the poor and non-savvy or "honest".

[darryl]

Some people simply must write, be it good or bad, commercial or not, just as some must make music or paint or sculpt or participate in any number of other arts or hobbies. The comparison to sport, where many participate but few professionally is not an entirely irrelevant one. There will still be books written if there is neither copyright nor monetary reward of any type. The Roman Empire had no intellectual property laws, yet still managed to produce works still admired today. Most authors in modern times are never able to make a living from their work, though many are motivated by the prospect that they might. Without some reasonable incentive for authors there will still be stories told. There will still be books, or at least ebooks, and they will be very widely available at little or no cost. But the unfortunate fact is that the standard generally will almost certainly fall, and there will be huge numbers of books which will simply not be written. Including many great books.

Our current intellectual property laws including copyright are badly broken. At worst they do positive harm. At best the bulk of the rewards that they provide accrue not to the actual authors or creators but to that group referred to as "rights-holders", who hold those rights for obscene and unjustified amounts of time. Certainly a fundamental review is long overdue, but will not happen because of the power of lobbyists and vested interests. Such a review should also consider whether a statutory monopoly is the best way to provide the desired incentive. Personally I suspect it may be though in a much shorter and restricted form. But other alternatives should also be considered.

I am not publicly condoning piracy nor suggesting that people break the existing laws, even though I consider them to be very bad laws in many respects. I hate to see authors not getting paid but must admit to not shedding any tears for some rights-holders in that position.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by haertig

It seems that some here are implying that those of us who don't want to pay what we consider a high price for an eBook are pirates. Not at all. We just don't pay those high prices (high in our mind, but maybe not yours). Instead, we will borrow books from the library, or read other, older books that do not cost as much to acquire. And if some publisher chooses to delay allowing libraries to handle their books, then we will continue on reading other stuff instead of those unavailable new release books.

Does that make us pirates in your mind? There is zero logic in that thought process IMHO.

I'm guessing this experiment is for the publisher to determine how to maximize their profit. That's a fine goal for them. For some people, this experiment may push them to buy more eBooks rather then waiting for them to become available in the library. That's fine. I have no qualms with that. But for me, and I would propose also for the majority of library patrons, we'll just read OTHER stuff instead, as I have stated repeatedly above. This does not imply that we are pirates in any way. It simply serves as evidence that we want to maximize the benefits of our entertainment dollars. Just like the publishers want to maximize their sales. It's the exact same reason why I haven't gone to a movie theater in decades (too expensive in my mind). I wait until the movie can be rented at a RedBox much cheaper. That economical behavior choice doesn't make me a movie pirate either.

Who are you asking? I'm not calling anyone pirates. My point is that if authors don't get paid, they won't write more books.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by darryl

I wasn't into Fictionwise or Books on Board though I did hear very good things about them and their business models. I haven't looked closely enough into the matter to have an informed opinion on the reason for the demise of either. Common sense and logic would indicate that business models built on discounting Big Publishing's books had Buckley's chance of surviving agency. Logically such business models were doomed by its introduction. To survive the businesses concerned needed to find a new business model which could thrive under the new arrangements. Neither seem to have succeeded.

A matador of course may wave a red cape at a bull. I don't know what you call a person who waves a red cape at a penguin. Good luck.



We've had this discussion before and I don't expect we will ever agree. However, I would respectfully point out that pricing below Big Publishing does not automatically make a business model unsustainable nor constitute a race to the bottom. For the former to be true would require Big Publishing be so efficient and competitive that no one else could do better. Yet Amazon clearly has. Comprehensively.

It's pretty hard for Agency to cause someone to go out of business if they go out of business prior to Agency pricing, unless of course you happen to have a time machine. It is, however, a convenient whipping boy. Most of the discounted book stores went out of business locally around the same time. Discounted books is a difficult market to be in. There is no margin of error.

Amazon happily adopted Agency pricing once their competition faded away. Amazon sustained below cost pricing on certain key books because they were able to use their much larger business to subsidize ebooks in order to maintain their market share. The only thing that Amazon from a pricing point of view has shown is that it's good to have deep pockets.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by darryl

Some people simply must write, be it good or bad, commercial or not, just as some must make music or paint or sculpt or participate in any number of other arts or hobbies. The comparison to sport, where many participate but few professionally is not an entirely irrelevant one. There will still be books written if there is neither copyright nor monetary reward of any type. The Roman Empire had no intellectual property laws, yet still managed to produce works still admired today. Most authors in modern times are never able to make a living from their work, though many are motivated by the prospect that they might. Without some reasonable incentive for authors there will still be stories told. There will still be books, or at least ebooks, and they will be very widely available at little or no cost. But the unfortunate fact is that the standard generally will almost certainly fall, and there will be huge numbers of books which will simply not be written. Including many great books.

Our current intellectual property laws including copyright are badly broken. At worst they do positive harm. At best the bulk of the rewards that they provide accrue not to the actual authors or creators but to that group referred to as "rights-holders", who hold those rights for obscene and unjustified amounts of time. Certainly a fundamental review is long overdue, but will not happen because of the power of lobbyists and vested interests. Such a review should also consider whether a statutory monopoly is the best way to provide the desired incentive. Personally I suspect it may be though in a much shorter and restricted form. But other alternatives should also be considered.

I am not publicly condoning piracy nor suggesting that people break the existing laws, even though I consider them to be very bad laws in many respects. I hate to see authors not getting paid but must admit to not shedding any tears for some rights-holders in that position.

This is something we can agree on. If you look at how authors made money through various time period, it has varied. Through out much of time, authors were either wealthy, belonged to a religious community or had wealthy patrons. With the rise of the newspapers, authors started making money selling stories to various newspapers and magazines. We saw a big jump in the number of authors when newspapers and magazines came into being.

Ben Franklin, the main proponent of putting copyright into the Constitution was a newspaper publisher and wrote to fill space in his newspaper, not to sell books. He wanted copyright to keep other newspapers from simply printing his stories in their papers. Even up through the 50's the vast majority of fiction was first serialized in magazines. Form followed payment. Dickens and Verne wrote lengthy, somewhat repetitive books with chapter lengths that made each chapter easy for serialization. For example, A Tale of Two Cities, was first published in 31 weekly installments in a literary periodical.

I suspect that a tiered copyright system would solve a lot of problems. Heck, I suspect that even something as simple as making copyright holders file for copyright and then renew the copyright every seven years (the original term of copyright in the US) might solve a lot of problems and save a lot of orphaned works from obscurity.

In the US, the primary driver for long copyright periods is movies and music. Publishers and authors simply don't have the economic hefty. I've more sanguine of improved results than you are. Eventually, something will happen that crystallizes a new business model.

Culture leads laws, not the other way around. Culture in the US, IMPO, is heading towards having everything available. Kids are use to using YouTube to watch video and listen to music. I would not be terribly surprised if at some point, something similar to the consent decree that made it practical to play music on the radio occurring for other media. There are too many people working towards that point.

[Shad Plante]

John Scalzi weighed in on this with a reasonable take:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2018/07/...lending-thing/

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Shad Plante

John Scalzi weighed in on this with a reasonable take:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2018/07/...lending-thing/

Sounds reasonable to me.

One thing that is implicit in all this that I find interesting is that Tor thinks they have enough of their books checked out via this in the first four months to make a difference. Tor has the data that tells them how many copies of various authors get checked out and they know how many licenses they sell to the various libraries for each book.

Of course, we know that if Scalzi is a best selling author and if the sales figures that he has posted in the past are correct (around 24K ebooks in the first year for Lock In), then for the average Tor author, the ebook sales are likely under 10K for ebooks. It's been 3 years since those figures, so the numbers may have shifted a bit, but I suspect for most authors, every sales counts a lot more than most readers think.

[radbaddude]

As long as Angry Robot doesn't do this too.. not sure how I feel about this..

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

And sometimes you don't make Jack and go out of business, which is what happened to Fictionwise and BooksOnBoard. Fictionwise sold itself to B&N back in 2009, before the Agency pricing model was introduced in 2010. The Buywise Club, i.e. Fictionwise's discount business model, was actually discontinued in March 2010.

Getting cheap books is great, except that if it's not a sustainable business model, then it goes out of business. Many companies have found that playing the discount game and the race to the bottom tends to be an unsustainable business model. You are basically trying to survive on a very narrow profit margin, which means anytime there is a down turn, you go belly up. Anyone remember what else happened in 2009? Big economic downturn.

Sorry, but I'm going to say you're very much wrong here. Fictionwise was doing rather well. Their business model was based on being able to give discounts and they had a club you bought into to get even more discounts. When Agency came into being, Fictionwise's business model was unable to be kept going. It required being able to give discounts. When that was taken away, they lost out big time. BooksOnBoard also relied on discounts. And again, that was taken away.

Both where doing well before agency. After, not so well. So yes, Apple and the price fix five did put both companies out of business.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Sorry, but I'm going to say you're very much wrong here. Fictionwise was doing rather well. Their business model was based on being able to give discounts and they had a club you bought into to get even more discounts. When Agency came into being, Fictionwise's business model was unable to be kept going. It required being able to give discounts. When that was taken away, they lost out big time. BooksOnBoard also relied on discounts. And again, that was taken away.

Both where doing well before agency. After, not so well. So yes, Apple and the price fix five did put both companies out of business.

You can say it, but that doesn't make it so. The dates just don't support your narrative.

[darryl]

@pwalker8. I dealt with neither and haven't looked into at all until just now. As I understand it:

B&N acquired Fictionwise on March 5 2009 and announced grand plans for it as part of B&N's "digital strategy". It would seem that Fictionwise had been doing quite well up until that time.

Amazon gave in to Macmillan on 31 January 2010, and the operation of the price fixing conspiracy took effect then or shortly thereafter.

In March 2010 Fictionwise discontinued its Buywise club, giving no reasons for its decision. It seems logical that a club offering discounts on Big 6 titles would no longer be able to do so under agency, and the club was likely discontinued for this reason, though no reason was in fact given.

In November 2012 Fictionwise announced it was "winding down its business".

Books on Board stopped selling ebooks in early 2013. Bob Livosi, the owner, blamed both the deep pockets of his larger competitors and the lingering effects of agency. So far as agency is concerned he pointed not to the end of discounting but to the way the switch was handled. To quote from the article in Publishers Weekly at https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...ook-sales.html:

Indeed LiVolsi said he lost access to thousands of titles, some for more than a year, because of the Agency Model switch, and in the process he said, “we lost 70% of our customers.”

From my brief examination I see nothing in the timeline to justify a conclusion that the dates don't support JSWolf's comments in #57. Certainly they don't establish conclusively that agency was to blame for the demise of both companies. However, they are certainly consistent with this being the case. Based on the little research I have now done I tend to the opinion that agency played a large though not exclusive role in the demise of Books on Board. Fictionwise, as part of B&N, is a more difficult case. It's future was dependant on B&N's plans for it, and the direct cause of its demise was clearly an internal decision by B&N that Fictionwise no longer had a part to play in its "digital strategy". To what extent agency played a role in this it is difficult to say. I tend to the opinion that it was pretty well doomed from the time it became part of B&N. Had it remained independent agency would likely have played a large role in bringing it down anyway, especially given its reliance on its Buywise club.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by darryl

@pwalker8. I dealt with neither and haven't looked into at all until just now. As I understand it:

B&N acquired Fictionwise on March 5 2009 and announced grand plans for it as part of B&N's "digital strategy". It would seem that Fictionwise had been doing quite well up until that time.

Amazon gave in to Macmillan on 31 January 2010, and the operation of the price fixing conspiracy took effect then or shortly thereafter.

In March 2010 Fictionwise discontinued its Buywise club, giving no reasons for its decision. It seems logical that a club offering discounts on Big 6 titles would no longer be able to do so under agency, and the club was likely discontinued for this reason, though no reason was in fact given.

In November 2012 Fictionwise announced it was "winding down its business".

Books on Board stopped selling ebooks in early 2013. Bob Livosi, the owner, blamed both the deep pockets of his larger competitors and the lingering effects of agency. So far as agency is concerned he pointed not to the end of discounting but to the way the switch was handled. To quote from the article in Publishers Weekly at https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...ook-sales.html:



From my brief examination I see nothing in the timeline to justify a conclusion that the dates don't support JSWolf's comments in #57. Certainly they don't establish conclusively that agency was to blame for the demise of both companies. However, they are certainly consistent with this being the case. Based on the little research I have now done I tend to the opinion that agency played a large though not exclusive role in the demise of Books on Board. Fictionwise, as part of B&N, is a more difficult case. It's future was dependant on B&N's plans for it, and the direct cause of its demise was clearly an internal decision by B&N that Fictionwise no longer had a part to play in its "digital strategy". To what extent agency played a role in this it is difficult to say. I tend to the opinion that it was pretty well doomed from the time it became part of B&N. Had it remained independent agency would likely have played a large role in bringing it down anyway, especially given its reliance on its Buywise club.

I think you need to recheck your timelines. According to the court case, Apple didn't contact the publishers to start talks until December 9th, 2009. B&N bought Fictionwise 10 months earlier apparently to fold into their upcoming ebook store, a fairly common strategy. My understanding is Fictionwise was purchased for their customer base, not for their business model or actual store. Kobo did the same thing later with the Sony store.

Apple initially started with the suggestion of a couple of price points, which is how iTunes music worked. The publishers balked and Apple eventually suggested the Agency model. Amazon learned about the upcoming deal on January 18th, 2010 and complained to the FTC about it on Jan 31st. Amazon didn't have an agency agreement with the publishers until later in the spring.

Frankly, Amazon's pricing probably had a lot more to do with those stores going belly up than any future Apple "collusion". At that time, the stores were welcome to charge whatever they liked, but were charged a specific price by the publisher based on the suggested retail price. Amazon sold some books for less than they had to pay the publishers and many others at a very small profit. This is called a loss leader and is used to build market share.

I suspect that Amazon thought that they could use their 90% market share to squeeze the publishers into reducing the price Amazon was charged, a tactic they tried after the ruling. It didn't work due to the outcry when word of their squeeze play hit the news. One could argue that the news outcry against Amazon in favor of the publishers lead to Bezos buying the Washington Post in 2013.

Since Amazon has much deeper pockets than the smaller ebook stores, they could out last them. Thus you see Fictionwise selling themselves to B&N in March of 2009.

Books on Board never used the agency book model. When the agency model came around, they stopped carrying the big 5 books. Their issue was lack of capital. Their owner was quoted as saying he just couldn't compete with the deep pockets of Amazon, Apple and B&N.

The agency model drove us out of business narrative was mostly an attempt to get into Apple's deep pockets. Several of the small ebook stores tried to sue Apple making this claim. They lost the case in court.