plunging in

[gfish]

I know I should stay clear of Amazonfail, but I just want to say that a publisher which can't make a profit selling $9 etexts (or $5, or $2) deserves to go bankrupt. If amortized editing and design costs are really the lion's share of a physical book, the system is deeply, deeply broken.

(Even applying design costs to the etext version is largely ridiculous. How much design work does an etext need? I'd prefer it as a raw text file anyway, but a LaTeX-generated PDF would also be just fine as well. The only reason for fancy design in the first place is to catch people's attention in a store. Etext selection and browsing is nothing like that, so why bother with it in the first place? Tradition? Snob factor? Anything that can't be seen in the scaled down image of the book cover in an Amazon listing is a complete waste of money.)

I remain unconvinced of the long-term viability of selling data as a business model. But if you want to find a way for authors to make money, don't make it even harder by trying to defend these dinosaurs at the same time.

Comments

[gement.livejournal.com]

I have to say, there's probably a scale issue. In the long run, if data is the primary form of purchase, the numbers probably make more sense.

Between author advance, editor pay, marketing claptrap, and all the little gears it takes to make a billion dollar publishing house run smoothly, it would really add up on a short run.

This entire fight, and those like it, are a shell game of companies trying to push around an increasingly small profit margin so their share doesn't decline. (Which, if the pot is shrinking, means someone else taking a loss.)

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I'm still waiting to hear exactly what Apple is doing with DRM on ebooks. Well, okay, or how that is likely to evolve over time.

For that matter, the show's not over until the fat lady Google sings. It's kind of fascinating that the first major public skirmish was with Amazon, but I suspect Google might be edging closer to changing the landscape in a big way.

[maribou]

My problem is that for YEARS and YEARS they were telling everyone that the reason book prices kept skyrocketing was because of the increased costs of physical things like printing, shipping, warehousing... I heard this as a consumer & as a bookseller.

And now, suddenly, they are saying "oh no no, that's a tiny part of the total price, only about 10 percent." without any recognition that they used to be blaming it for everything. I tend to suspect the current version is the truth, but -

Do they think people are completely lacking in accumulated memory??

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

Yes. Same problem that politicians have.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

I think it was "pulp prices" when comic books went through the roof ... and never came back down.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

The thing is, what you're paying for isn't data--it's intellectual property in the *form* of data. The design costs go a lot deeper than making it fit a given UI; I could put you in touch with our layout artist who could tell you everything she does to the raw text, and she *doesn't* do content or copy editing. Which are also both very very necessary, and which really cannot be done by the creator (at least, not if you want a product worth paying for--look what happened when Anne Rice announced that she no longer needed an editor! Her books became crap, is what.) and which are both skilled labor. Which means that it's something that has to be paid for.

And speaking as someone who has done art direction, content editing AND copy editing, believe me! Unless you want to spend hours and hours wading through CRAP, you really really want someone to do those things before you buy that text file. Not having to wade through the crap really is worth that extra dollar or three.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Though you rather blithely use the term intellectual property, without addressing the ways in which intellectual property might not map to physical property.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

*wry grins* Intellectual property has been not mapping to physical property for years and years now. For instance, you own the copyright on the poem you posted the other day, even if you haven't written it down on a piece of paper. And that means that it's illegal for someone to reproduce without your permission, even electronically, and even more illegal for them to sell it without your permission, even electronically.

For that matter, think about a screenplay. It's intellectual property, certainly, and it doesn't really map directly to physical property. Can you hold a movie in your hands? Well, you can hold a DVD, but is that the actual movie? What if a movie is made from your screenplay (with or without you being paid for it) but doesn't go to DVD?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Editing will likely remain a paid position, yes. (Though I know people who do it for free for friends.) That doesn't mean it needs to be done by a publisher, nor does it mean that the editors working for publishers are really worth what they get paid. Can an author arrange for their own work to be properly edited? Of course, that's just a new skill needed to be successful. This may be a bad or good thing (marketing seems to be required of most new authors right now, for instance, and that often ends poorly), but it's hardly unthinkable. Lots of musicians are learning how to be recording engineers now for home recording, after all.

I was careful to explicitly not conflate editing with design. But like I said, raw text is fine. I'm dead serious, I've read dozens of books in that format. No layout needed. Or if you want to be fancy, do it up in LaTeX. Some minor markup and boom, you have some of the most perfect and beautiful typesetting ever produced. Fancy text layout is not required.

I think we have plenty of alternative filtering models to choose from, starting with the obvious word of mouth. Browsing a bookstore (that is, using the implicit filer of what managed to get published) is nice, but it's hardly the only way I choose which books to buy. I swim in a world of crap (the internet) and still find amazing pearls pretty much every day thanks to the extensive, decentralized filtering system of friends passing around links. Of all the concerns about how things will work in the new model, this worries me the least. Particularly since it's only really a problem if you're paying for the media, and, well, we've yet to see if that will really be the case.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

*wry grins* I know people who do free editing for their friends, too. There are a few exceptions, but in general, free editing is worth what you pay for it. I've seen more than one case where the author had to fix problems put in by their editing friends, and spent hours and hours doing it.

Personally, I think the "you have to sell your work to a large publishing house in order to get published" model is about to blow away on the winds. Unfortunately, it's actively crumbling and we don't quite have anything set up to replace it yet ... but we're working on it! The model we used to create Ravens actually worked quite well ... but it was a benefit, and it didn't involve paying anyone for their work. We want a model that will do that, too!

[beaq.livejournal.com]

"nor does it mean that the editors working for publishers are really worth what they get paid"

Do you know what they're being paid? I bet that's not where any large fraction of the money I pay for a book goes, anyway.

[solarbird]

How much design work is needed for a book depends upon the book in question. But even the simplest books will still need attractive cover - or perhaps more properly in this new environment, poster art. People will still browse, still organise visually (in many or most cases, tho' obviously not all), and so on.

(Out of curiosity, do you have album art view up in your music player or do you set it up as a plaintext list?)

Not that I'm defending the price points here, I'm not. I tend to agree with Amazon here, just not the totaly dickheaded way they're going about it.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Poster art is an excellent way to think about it. I have no doubt that aspect will continue to exist.

Album art shows up on my ipod, and because of that I occasionally go on completest binges adding missing ones to the hundred of random old files I have. But I rarely see them, since I only need to look at the device to chose playlists. On my laptop, no, I never have the album art view on. I like having the wider context of seeing the current playlist in spreadsheet view.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

There is album art on mp3 players?
I don't think I understand the point in that. It'd be like having a book with one of those greeting-card chips in it so it sings while you're reading.
(for reference, this (http://www.pjrc.com/mp3/) is my mp3 player, which has been running a 120 gig hard drive for ten years now.)

[koruja.livejournal.com]

I know that damiana_swan already touched on this, but as someone who works in the graphic design end of publishing, I can tell you that what we do isn't just making pretty pictures and choosing fancy font types. The bulk of what we do is clean up the content given to use from the writers so that they can seamlessly be transferred to various forms of publication. Including print, electronic web-site content, help menu content, interactive PDFs, etc... This includes content QAing (not editing, layout management and design and so much more that I know for a fact that these publications need to go through in order to not come out as crap... after that we do the "pretty stuff". Now... if you are talking about straight up fiction reads... this is minimal. But if you are talking textbook, information content etc... There is some very hefty lifting done by graphic designers and QAers.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I admit, fiction is my default model when thinking about publishing. Obviously some types of books need more layout work than others.

...on the other hand, go back a generation or two and even information-heavy works like textbooks were much, much more simply laid out. At what point is complicated modern layout just a fashion, a way for publishers to make their works stand out visually and thus charge more for them?

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

"If amortized editing and design costs are really the lion's share of a physical book, the system is deeply, deeply broken."

Why? I doubt that there are numbers for it, but my impression is that, in general, the mass creation of physical objects has been steadily getting cheaper, to the point where sometimes features are added to things solely in order to make them expensive enough to be worth selling. Whereas time-intensive tasks that require intelligent people have on the whole declined relatively little, in the areas that can't be automated. And unlike other time-intensive tasks, native English proficiency is not something that can generally be outsourced to intelligent people in countries with lower wages.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Hrm. My impression isn't that physical production is getting radically cheaper so much as the margins are getting much, much thinner because of immense competition. I'm not sure that really applies in publishing, as they hold a monopoly on each title.

[triskadekaphile.livejournal.com]

Why In Fact Publishing Will Not Go Away Anytime Soon: A Deeply Slanted Play in Three Acts (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/03/why-in-fact-publishing-will-not-go-away-anytime-soon-a-deeply-slanted-play-in-three-acts/)

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yes, but "publishing" can cover a broad range of organizations. Right now there are legacy forces which are keeping the huge old publishing houses going, but I think they're going to crumble as dramatically as the newspaper business once those are broken. Namely, once etexts get going enough to break their hold on the physical supply chain. It's *hard* to get copies of books into bookstores. Once physical books become boutique items and the majority of readers are buying -- and browsing, which is a separate post -- online, that will be reduced. Likewise, physical production is hard, particularly as we've be trained to reject anything without super-expensive production values, see above in this thread. It's simply much, much easier to produce a professional looking PDF than a professional looking -- and feeling -- book. Lastly, right now we have this weird snobbery about being a "real" author who has "really" been published. For some reason literature never glamorized being "indie", so being self-published is still this huge mark of shame. (This largely seems perpetuated by authors themselves, which seems rather self-serving of them.) That will obviously take some time to fall away as well.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Fishie, a question:

I would never in a million years argue with you about how physics work.

Why do you keep arguing with Dami and I - both of whom know writing and publishing through years of professional experience - about how publishing works?

As I've stated before, intellectual property isn't "data." Data is the vector for a creative work, not the process involved in that creative work, nor the true result of it.

The "data" behind a creative work involves many, many hours of skilled labor (the skills of which are won through training and even more time and labor) on the part of many people. Making it commercially viable - in any format - requires even more.

Think of a book (any format, any subject) as an airplane.

By the arguments you've given here, all pieces of metal should fly. And flying metal should be free.

After all, the technology exists to make metal fly.

The potential of metal to fly has been shown.

The process involved in making metal fly has been commonly known for decades.

And people make metal fly simply for the love of doing so.

Are you planning to hop on a piece of steel and expecting it to take you to Paris?

Does the metal fly because it is composed of atoms, or because it has been shaped by skilled labor and technology?

For that matter, will you fly an airplane made "for the love of it" to Paris?

And do you see the future of aviation being made by people who craft airplanes for free?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Physics involves physical laws, which are not up for debate. We are talking here about legal systems and social structures, which are whatever we decide them to be. They have no fundamental truth or reality to them, any more than current clothing fashions do.

The plane thing is a completely specious argument, and you know it. Atoms are not like data. You cannot copy atoms for free. You cannot send atoms across the world for (basically) free. If you take atoms from someone, they no longer have the atoms. They are radically different things, and applying the logic one to the other will only lead to really silly outcomes.

That said, there is growing interest in open design projects. I might be suspicious of a physical plane being given out for free, but the data of a plane design? Sure, I'd consider that if I finally get around to building my own plane. Data != atoms. A free physical plane is suspect because of the work and materials needed to make it. A copy of a plane design is just as good as the original -- maybe better, if this means many people are building them and working out all the bugs.

I'll also point out that the margin in small plane manufacturing is pretty much zero, so in fact many are made "for the love of it". Why are you so down on things being done for the love of it? I'd rather live in a world where that was the default, instead of feeling obliged to work a job you hate just for the money. If we're getting to choose our imaginary social and technological structures, that is, like you seem to be doing in wanting to ignore the very real issue of piracy. It exists. It's going to get worse. We need to be working out how to deal with it, instead of wringing our hands and whining.

For instance: musicians haven't really been harmed by music piracy, even though revenues for the publishers have dropped quite a bit. Why? Because musicians make money from concerts, a non-piratable experience instead of raw data. There is not analogous thing that writers currently do. There are readings and signings, but will people pay for them? I'm dubious. As a first step, we need to be thinking about what to replace signing with, if there isn't a physical object. (Collectible figurines, related to the book, maybe? The cover art on high quality postcards, which are signed? Comic artists will do custom sketches, maybe that can be adapted?)

If you want to defend your profession from being obsoleted by technology (a sad thing, but hardly an unusual thing), then let's start thinking about these things now. I'm not against you, really I'm not. I'm just desperately trying to get some serious thinking going about these issues, and I keep falling into the same antagonistic traps that everyone does. It's emotional for you, because it's personal. It's emotional for me, because it's so blazingly obvious that massive change is inevitable here, and I don't have as much patience as I should for people who don't accept that.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

(As for musicians not being harmed by music piracy, I suspect you could have a lively debate on that topic with the professional musicians in your life. Just because artists have managed to make a living around music piracy - not an easy task, as they could tell you - it doesn't mean no harm is done. Producing music costs tons of money, time and energy. When someone unconnected with that effort posts the results of it online and hundreds or thousands of people take it without giving anything back to the artists, trust me - harm is done.)

[triskadekaphile.livejournal.com]

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html

[triskadekaphile.livejournal.com]

also http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/25/this-manuscript-hires-people/