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

[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?

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Um, I know what intellectual property is, and it's an area of law I follow moderately closely.

There are a couple of things to look at here: first, intellectual property does not behave like physical property. This is fairly obvious - if I steal your cow, you don't have a cow anymore. If I pirate your music, there might be something to be said for value dilution (though that's less trivial than it might seem at first glance) but I haven't removed something from you at all. I'm not advocating that there shouldn't be something in the general genre of what we now call intellectual property, but that it's being generally discussed in terms of physical property is simple-minded and misleading.

Second, and far more in our faces (though really, I think the first is the more interesting philosophical issue) the social, legal and technological landscape in which intellectual property exists has changed a lot, and is changing. Patents are being used more to suppress than promote innovation. Copyright is getting absurd - in the US, it's hard to say if anything contemporaneous with Mickey Mouse or younger will ever become public domain. Is intellectual property something that a creator should be able to hold and pass down to their heirs in perpetuity? What social function does that serve? Again, I'm not against any form of copyright, but what we have is getting pretty silly.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

For my company, patents are almost purely used to suppress competition and stifle innovation by companies without enough dosh to defend their innovations. Anything we actually care about is a trade secret.
I think copyright is much more defensible, insofar as it's *hard* to create a worthwhile artistic work, but incredibly easy to duplicate it. But I agree there is zero public good in nigh-indefinite copyright periods, and significant public harm.
But with that said, most of what I consider the greatest works of humanity were created before copyright existed. If we got rid of copyright, people would still be creating stuff.

[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.

[maribou]

I'm *thisclose* to saying "ah ha! the increase in book prices is all the HMOs' fault!!!"

somebodystopme