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]

I've been learning about non-fiction publishing a little bit at work, at least journal-style non-fiction publishing, and the difference shocked me.

F'rinstance, did you know that more and more reputable journals--peer-review journals--are moving to a model where the author *pays* to be published? One of my doctors just submitted an article to a journal, and then discovered that it was a darned good thing she was also a subscriber (at over $250/year) because if she hadn't been, the journal would have charged her over $250 *per page* to print her article. After insisting that she turn copyright over to them.

When satyrblade publishes an article in Realms of Fantasy or Witches & Pagans, he gets paid for it, AND he gets to keep ownership of the rights.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Print academic journal publishing is so obviously a racket that it's not a useful reference for discussing the market for ordinary books. I certainly hope the big academic journal publishers die out soon, because they add almost nothing to the system.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I'm glad my field pretty much ignores journals entirely. All the action in CS is in conference publications, which have a much saner turn-around time. And even then, you just read them on a PDF. The conferences don't bother printing them anymore, and usually you just grab a copy from the author's site directly. Which means they're all edited and graphic designed by the author (unless they come from a very rich organization). Which means some could certainly be better, but it's still a working model.

[pielology.livejournal.com]

"Moving to"? Pay-to-publish has been standard in the sciences for a long time. The current revolutionary new academic publishing model involves allowing authors to pay *even more* so that the general public will be able to read their article without paying $30.