Authors United, allies, demand government intervention

[murg]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I just buy the books I want to read and clean them up with Sigil or Calibre.

I was just disputing the assertion made earlier that big publishers put out sloppy books while indies put out hand-crafted miracles of formatting.

I also clean up my ebooks.

But I shouldn't have to. Not at what the BPHs are charging for them.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by murg

But if I'm paying $12.99 or $14.99 like the publishers want, I expect that they've at least proofed the scan errors. And, they are professional publishers, who make a big deal about the level of service they put into producing books.

Since the indie books are a lot cheaper, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

And that, I agree with a hundred percent.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I accept that you got a crappy scan from a major publisher. There's always exceptions to rules. But on the whole can you honestly say that indie books are presented more professionally than books from the majors?

It hasn't been my experience and I'd wager that if major e-books were that terribly formatted as the norm, it would be a big story.

Again, I tend to buy more books from indies and small presses than the biggies. But the indies I tend to read are authors who have previously been published by a major publisher. Because that fact tells me they have at least some talent.

I'm not trying to run indies down. Just trying to keep it honest.

One thing that I've noticed is that for some books, calibre does a poor job of changing from mobi to epub. I have had some books that looked like terrible scan issues, but then when I happened to read the book on the kindle app, those scan issues disappeared. Sure I have run across some books with actual scan issues, but sometimes it's a translation issue (from one format to another).

[darryl]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

One thing that I've noticed is that for some books, calibre does a poor job of changing from mobi to epub. I have had some books that looked like terrible scan issues, but then when I happened to read the book on the kindle app, those scan issues disappeared. Sure I have run across some books with actual scan issues, but sometimes it's a translation issue (from one format to another).

My experience is that Calibre does an excellent job of converting from Mobi to Epub and vice versa. That is not to say that every conversion is perfect. Perhaps you can assist by providing details of the books that "looked like terrible scan issues" in epub but were okay when read in the Kindle app. The particular developers are always looking to improve their software.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by hardcastle

It's not a matter of justification. It's attacking the arguments made, not the person making the arguments. Konrath goes for the cheap shot too often, despite not having to. He can destroy each and every point they make without trying, with ample evidence.

I'd happily post around a link to a proper, respectful destruction of each of AG or AU's points, but if I gave Konrath's AU blog post link to friends of mine they'd wonder what this guy is getting so worked up about.

Joe Konrath's fisk, complete with sarcasm and ridicule, does absolutely demolish what you so generously refer to as "AU's points". He does so in an entertaining way. This is in my view proper, but certainly not respectful. This Authors United effort, like their previous one, is so bad as to almost be a caricature of this type of letter rather than a serious effort at persuasion. Joe Konrath uses sarcasm and ridicule freely, and does indeed ridicule the people making the "arguments". They deserve it, particularly so in the context where their letter was itself little more than a ridiculous, hysterical and largely baseless attack on Amazon and Bezos, in an attempt to ultimately have Amazon broken up. There is nothing civilised or genteel about either their letter or their other conduct. The Marquis of Queensbury has no place in a street fight.

If Joe Konrath's fisks are not to your liking, perhaps you are better off not reading them. Because Joe's fisks are all about ridicule. They are all like this, and I look forward eagerly to reading each one. And I have difficulty of thinking of any person or group more deserving of being ridiculed than Authors United.

[fjtorres]

For a non-mocking critique of the cluelessness of the AU gang, consider this one from ever-polite KKR:
http://kriswrites.com/2015/07/15/bus...the-wrong-war/

She takes on my point from above that instead of taking on Amazon over made-up grievances, they ought to be using their fading credibility to take on real issues affecting all tradpub authors right now:

It has been shown time and time again, in industry after industry, that when information on income and earnings is controlled by a single source, that source will bend the information to benefit the source, not the others who also earned the money. It’s not that the source is venal (although it might be). It might simply be inertia or long-existing habits and structures.

Unless pressure comes from the outside, that source will not change because it has no incentive to change.

So rather than contact the DOJ about Amazon with a complaint that completely misunderstands both the law and business, perhaps Authors United, the Authors Guild, and those who claim to care about authors’ rights should start arguing for greater transparency—from publishers, agents, managers, and anyone else who gets revenue that should go to writers.

It’s time that writers act like real business people, and start putting pressure on the organizations who control our income.

Traditional publishers have already gotten into trouble with the Department of Justice for bad business practices. It’s not hard for anyone who understands business to believe that organizations which have already proven that they’ll break the law to have a business advantage will break the law in other places as well. Companies that are willing to cut corners will look at the most vulnerable parties first, and in publishing, those parties are naïve writers, who expect honesty and get none.

Neither the music industry nor the publishing industry has an internal reason to change its reporting structures. Those structures also benefit agents, no matter how much they complain to the press. Because a lot of agents skim. Some do it on the float, by holding money in interest-bearing accounts for as long as a month—which is, by the way, perfectly legal if the writer has agreed to it in a contract. Other agencies actually skim by “losing” payments or by taking a larger percentage than they deserve.

Even if individual agents believe that the system must change, the company they work for, the agency, will not take on this fight. It’s not in an agency’s best interest either.

Writers have to do it. And the big names should stop wasting their time and what little clout they have with things that have nothing to do with the sharp decline in traditionally published writer revenue, and go after the thing that actually has impacted writer revenue: the way that this new digital income gets reported.

I suspect I’m preaching to the choir on my blog here, and nothing will happen. But here’s my hope: someone, somewhere, will organize the big names and some writers organizations into doing something useful, like demanding that publishers have modern financial accounting to their writing partners—and not the online “reports” that some publishers have reluctantly posted. Things like this, also recommended in the Berklee study:

It should be fairly straightforward to give creators access to an app or Web page that electronically accesses real-time, in-depth, and comprehensible royalty information about their sales or plays on these platforms— data that can be reported to provide useful analytics, similar to an online banking platform—and that could conceivably offer a suite of banking services to creators if transparent revenue data was accessible. —Fair Music: Transparency and Payment Flows in the Music Industry, P. 7

I know, I know, I’m dreaming. In a world where Big Name authors believe that the platform that sells most of their books is harming them, expecting sense is probably not logical.

Ah, well. I am putting this idea out there. I do hope it makes a tiny difference.

(Bolding mine.)

There is a lot more at the source including an in-depth look at how the *music* industry splits its money and where its debates are headed. Very useful in light of the ongoing catfights over streaming over there. Recommended.

[fjtorres]

Submitted for consideration:

Salon interviews Preston:
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/14/auth...was_broken_up/

Naturally, Konrath has been all over it:
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2015/0...s-preston.html

The interviewer, the oh-so-impartial author of this piece:

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/10/5_re...appy_birthday/

He too has been suitably critiqued:

http://www.thepassivevoice.com/07/20...appy-birthday/

Especially this one:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/07/20...comment-313001

It’s a frickin golden age for authors — more authors than ever because they are now making a much better cut of sales than the few and rare big-advance authors of the legacy system. There are no Manhattan gatekeepers sipping martinis keeping authors out of print or digital. The reader is the new gatekeeper and that is a good thing for everyone since it’s all really about the author and the reader.

As an indie author, I may be critical of Amazon’s requirement for exclusivity, but it has done more to allow authors to be published than at any other time. More and more indie authors are making money from sales of their books, some paying bills, making a decent living (for a change) or even making life-changing income, than ever.

Amazon made it a golden age for readers as well. Amazon has done more to bring books to the masses than anything. The person in East Podunk who has no Borders or Barnes and Noble, let alone small independent bookstore can get practically every book ever published online using an easy payment interface, at a great price and delivered right to their Kindle — or right to their doorstep with 2 day shipping with Prime. Reading books, both eBooks and print. Anywhere in the world. Who really cares about knocking elbows with some mucky mucks in a bookstore?

Readers want to read. Period.

Amazon makes that so much easier and THAT is why Amazon is the king of the book world.

If anything, it’s READERS who have chosen Amazon over the bookstore, indie or big box. If you are going to get mad over the loss of the bookstore, get mad at readers. They chose with their mouses and trackpads — Amazon.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

For a non-mocking critique of the cluelessness of the AU gang, consider this one from ever-polite KKR:
http://kriswrites.com/2015/07/15/bus...the-wrong-war/

She takes on my point from above that instead of taking on Amazon over made-up grievances, they ought to be using their fading credibility to take on real issues affecting all tradpub authors right now:






(Bolding mine.)

There is a lot more at the source including an in-depth look at how the *music* industry splits its money and where its debates are headed. Very useful in light of the ongoing catfights over streaming over there. Recommended.

I too recommend this post. It is excellent. KKR, like Joe Konrath, is well worth a read, albeit for different reasons. KKR, whilst agreeing with Joe Konrath's comments, herself shows a remarkable degree of restraint. And, slightly off-topic here but well worth a read, is her comments on accounting transparency. In a nutshell, she agrees with a commentator who predicts that this will be the next big battle in the music industry, from where it will likely spread to publishing. Given today's technology twice yearly and largely "opaque" reporting on Royalties is almost as archaic as the Large Publishing Cartel members themselves. Given this lack of transparency, one can only wonder what discrepancies proper audits of Royalties based on full and complete disclosure of figures may turn up. Based on the past behaviour of some of the players I can only say that after I shook hands with them I would be counting my fingers.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by darryl

I too recommend this post. It is excellent. KKR, like Joe Konrath, is well worth a read, albeit for different reasons. KKR, whilst agreeing with Joe Konrath's comments, herself shows a remarkable degree of restraint. And, slightly off-topic here but well worth a read, is her comments on accounting transparency. In a nutshell, she agrees with a commentator who predicts that this will be the next big battle in the music industry, from where it will likely spread to publishing. Given today's technology twice yearly and largely "opaque" reporting on Royalties is almost as archaic as the Large Publishing Cartel members themselves. Given this lack of transparency, one can only wonder what discrepancies proper audits of Royalties based on full and complete disclosure of figures may turn up. Based on the past behaviour of some of the players I can only say that after I shook hands with them I would be counting my fingers.

Accounting transparency in publishing is going to be very topical soon because when revenues decline "partners" start looking at each other askance. Some of the big name authors have mandatory auditing in their contracts but very few others do. In the olden days, asking for a royalty audit, even when allowed by contract, often led to blacklisting. I vaguely remember one author (KKR herself, I think) saying that one publisher reverted all her titles rather than face an audit.

Another author with both tradpub and indie titles similarly ranked at Amazon reported that the Amazon sales alone for the tradpub title exceeded the reported sales for all channels, leaving the impression that those channels provided negative sales. A challenge to the publisher brought a substatially higher revised statement.

Not that tradpubbers are necessarily shorting authors on purpose, but their internal processes are so archaic and downsizing so extreme it is impossible to tell incompetence from malice from the outside. Of course, implemening transparent reporting costs money that is going to be increasingly hard to find in coming months.

http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/0...arter-of-2015/

In terms of formats, hardback sales dropped 6.7%, to $463 million. Paperback sales rose 8.6%, to $443 million, and ebooks fell 7.5%, to $374 million. Downloaded audiobooks continued its growth streak, with a 33.6% increase over the same quarter last year. Physical audio, mass market, paperback and board book formats all experienced growth this quarter as well.

The AAP also reported today that total publisher revenues were down 6.6% in the first quarter at $2.22 billion, compared to $2.38 billion for the first quarter in 2014. That figure includes sales for all tracked categories (Trade, K-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education Course Materials, Professional Publishing, and University Presses).

(Note the shift from hardcovers and ebooks to the cheaper paperback formats, which had long been declining. Newstands and supermarkets must be happy.)

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

One thing that I've noticed is that for some books, calibre does a poor job of changing from mobi to epub. I have had some books that looked like terrible scan issues, but then when I happened to read the book on the kindle app, those scan issues disappeared. Sure I have run across some books with actual scan issues, but sometimes it's a translation issue (from one format to another).

That may be. Yet the books I purchase from Amazon tend to be the ones from the big publishers (since the price difference is usually notable). So if your assertion is right, even with Calibre converting them to ePub, they still (in general) look better than the indie ePubs I buy from Smashwords and B&N.

To give concrete examples, I recently read Black Rain from Masuji Ibuse. From a big publisher, purchased through Amazon, converted to ePub by Calibre. Book looked great.

I bought Steven Saylor's A Twist at the End. Self published (though originally a paper book from a big publisher). It looked better than some indies I've bought, but I had to clean up the formatting and the table of contents was terrible (it listed sections, but not chapters, for instance).

Or, a better example: I bought Peter Brandvold's self published A Bullet for Sartain. ePub from B&N. It was a mess (looks like it's been re-self published, with a new cover, so it may be better now).

I also bought Peter Brandvold's The Bells of El Diablo, published by Signet. The book looks great. Like the paperback I've seen in stores (I may have had to justify the text. I don't remember for sure now).

I haven't even touched on editing and spell checking.

Again, I support the indies. I just don't want to pretend that the big publishers don't add any value. Though there may be anecdotal cases, if you buy ten books from the majors and ten indie books, we all know which batch will be more professional, overall.

Sorry, this is a completely off topic conversation.

[pwalker8]

The key word in what I said is _some_ books. Not all, not most, but some. The first book I noticed this on is Tamora Pierces' Circle of Magic #1: Sandry's Book ( a youth book for those not familiar with Ms Pierce's books). When I was reading it in Marvin, I noticed a number of what looked like bad scanning errors, yet when I happened to look at it in the Kindle app, those errors went away. I assume that there was some specific letter combination that either the DRM removal or Calibre conversion process didn't handle well. No idea what. My only real point is that it's pretty easy to jump at a conclusion and blame the publisher when it's not the author or publisher's fault.

I rarely notice scanning issues in the vast majority of ebooks that I read. For one reason, most of the ebooks aren't scanned, but rather come from the electronic copy. Another reason is that it takes a pretty major error for me to notice it.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

The key word in what I said is _some_ books. Not all, not most, but some. The first book I noticed this on is Tamora Pierces' Circle of Magic #1: Sandry's Book ( a youth book for those not familiar with Ms Pierce's books). When I was reading it in Marvin, I noticed a number of what looked like bad scanning errors, yet when I happened to look at it in the Kindle app, those errors went away. I assume that there was some specific letter combination that either the DRM removal or Calibre conversion process didn't handle well. No idea what. My only real point is that it's pretty easy to jump at a conclusion and blame the publisher when it's not the author or publisher's fault.

I rarely notice scanning issues in the vast majority of ebooks that I read. For one reason, most of the ebooks aren't scanned, but rather come from the electronic copy. Another reason is that it takes a pretty major error for me to notice it.

What format was the Amazon book? If it was azw3 you could use the Calibre editor to see if it's different in the epub, but this sounds like it may have been the dreaded topaz format.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

The key word in what I said is _some_ books. Not all, not most, but some. The first book I noticed this on is Tamora Pierces' Circle of Magic #1: Sandry's Book ( a youth book for those not familiar with Ms Pierce's books). When I was reading it in Marvin, I noticed a number of what looked like bad scanning errors, yet when I happened to look at it in the Kindle app, those errors went away. I assume that there was some specific letter combination that either the DRM removal or Calibre conversion process didn't handle well. No idea what. My only real point is that it's pretty easy to jump at a conclusion and blame the publisher when it's not the author or publisher's fault.

I rarely notice scanning issues in the vast majority of ebooks that I read. For one reason, most of the ebooks aren't scanned, but rather come from the electronic copy. Another reason is that it takes a pretty major error for me to notice it.

Interesting. It may be some problem with the conversion of that book, but not necessarily so. It could also be the way Marvin renders that particular book or peculiarities in the hardware. And yes, I agree it is pretty easy to jump to conclusions and blame the author or publisher. Or, for that matter, Calibre. My only observation is that I would expect to see very few Big 5 ebooks with problems. However, it seems that, for whatever reasons, this is not the case.

[DiapDealer]

The removal of DRM from a topaz book can definitely result in ocr-type errors that do not occur in the original format. That's because the DRM-removal process uses the underlying ocr-text (included in its—usually—uncorrected form for text-search purposes) to "recreate" the text of the ebook. Because the original version is individual glyphs drawn on the screen, and impossible* to recreate except as SVG images of "pages".

With all other formats, DRM removal has no effect* on the actual content.



* except for the rare and/or obsolete ones I'm forgetting--which someone will certainly blast me over should I neglect to include this disclaimer

[darryl]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

The removal of DRM from a topaz book can definitely result in ocr-type errors that do not occur in the original format. That's because the DRM-removal process uses the underlying ocr-text (included in its—usually—uncorrected form for text-search purposes) to "recreate" the text of the ebook. Because the original version is individual glyphs drawn on the screen, and impossible* to recreate except as SVG images of "pages".

With all other formats, DRM removal has no effect* on the actual content.



* except for the rare and/or obsolete ones I'm forgetting--which someone will certainly blast me over should I neglect to include this disclaimer

I know topaz is a problematic format. I'm amazed that it can be converted in any reasonable form. However, to quote pwalker;

One thing that I've noticed is that for some books, calibre does a poor job of changing from mobi to epub. I have had some books that looked like terrible scan issues, but then when I happened to read the book on the kindle app, those scan issues disappeared.

His talk of scans certainly suggests topaz, but as I understand things topaz files have their own file extensions, and would not use mobi or azw3.