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??

[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!

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

Yes. Same problem that politicians have.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

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

[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]

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?

[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]

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.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

More a long-desired result of more powerful and accessible layout technology, I'm thinking.

[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.

[koruja.livejournal.com]

Ah, but you are forgetting all the work that goes into putting together the indecis, appendices, glossaries, tables of content (and subsection TOCs). All of which require extensive cross-referencing, marking and formatting. Even if these things seem non-interactive in paper format, they are actually quite rich in coding on the desktop publishing level.

[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.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Wait, you *hand code* ToCs? In 2010?

The rest can be a real pain, yes. My original point was not that such work isn't needed, but that if the publishers are being honest about the price breakdown (which, as was pointed out elsethread, keeps radically changing) then it points to a radical inefficiency in their internal corporate structure.

[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.)