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

[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.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

That's definitely true, especially in that the smaller margins drive a lot of the search for cheaper labor.

But the competition, along with technological innovation, is also generating incredible efficiency. Things that would have been literally impossible decades before are now commonplace. Prices may drift upwards, but in many areas, the raw power that we get for that price has increased vastly more. And so what I'd say is that the increased productivity has meant that it takes fewer people to make the "same things", which in turn means that the margins can be lower because they need to support fewer people. But that's all a big cycle, so I suppose you could also enter it at the point of lowered margins supporting fewer people, which in turn drives greater productivity through competition. And there's probably all sorts of potential substeps in there that I'm eliding. :)

There's also the invisible component of quality control; by some definitions we'd be much more "productive" if we spent less of our resources on making sure that stuff doesn't catch fire when plugged in, doesn't go bad in a day, doesn't choke babies, is accessible to handicapped people, and doesn't collapse in the next earthquake. But we've made a trade-off to spend more of our resources taking care of those things, and as a result there're often layers of quality surrounding us that we don't even notice. Which by and large helps produce a more stable society, which allows us to ignore whole categories of problems, which makes us more productive. Albeit with a greater potential for hidden costs and externalities.

(Cool! I think just argued myself into saying that assembly language is morally equivalent to clean energy and handmade craftsmanship, whilst Java and C# and all them fancy languages are outsourced jungle-destroying human-rights-abusing mass production!)

And sure, some of our stuff is Cheap Disposable Plastic Crap, but it usually performs the function it needs to for the time it was supposed to. There are almost always more expensive and better quality options out there, but instead of those being the only options, we also have the ability to get the particular subset of functionality that we want for a far lower price. (Which I suppose comes back to making the impossible possible.)