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

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

>An e-book is only good until either the file gets corrupted, or until the new edition of your reader doesn't read the old file format.

Or until the publisher decides to take away the book you "bought" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html), or until the publisher's distributor's webserviceprovider's IT-company's DRM server goes offline because someone forgot to pay someone else, or...

Besides, ebooks don't smell like old books. I *like* reading my granddad's old engineering texts. There are funny notes in Danish in the margins.

[hpapillon.livejournal.com]

See, I buy books in data format. But I *don't* buy 'ebooks'.

I buy stuff from webscription.net where I get a set of HTML files to download and keep. And they generally cost about $6 rather than $10. (More when they're brand-new, but that doesn't bother me.)

I can't imagine paying for any book-on-computer that *isn't* in HTML - I like putting things in my browser so I can adjust and resize to my heart's content. Reading things in PDF is painful. And I certainly don't want to buy something tied to a proprietary device that can be snatched away...

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Which is why I won't by any DRM'd books.

And for me, and my lifestyle, which at this point isn't big on owning a lot of physical stuff, owning a lot of physical books is a giant pain in the ass. I'm not saying I don't like them, but they're heavy, they take up a lot of space. and I have three pretty decent reader options (my lenovo tablet, my touchbook, and my phone). I don't have a problem with paying for content. I am not generically opposed to any possible form of DRM... I just haven't yet seen one which is appropriately archival. Bah.