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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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/)

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Fishie, a question:

I would never in a million years argue with you about how physics work.

Why do you keep arguing with Dami and I - both of whom know writing and publishing through years of professional experience - about how publishing works?

As I've stated before, intellectual property isn't "data." Data is the vector for a creative work, not the process involved in that creative work, nor the true result of it.

The "data" behind a creative work involves many, many hours of skilled labor (the skills of which are won through training and even more time and labor) on the part of many people. Making it commercially viable - in any format - requires even more.

Think of a book (any format, any subject) as an airplane.

By the arguments you've given here, all pieces of metal should fly. And flying metal should be free.

After all, the technology exists to make metal fly.

The potential of metal to fly has been shown.

The process involved in making metal fly has been commonly known for decades.

And people make metal fly simply for the love of doing so.

Are you planning to hop on a piece of steel and expecting it to take you to Paris?

Does the metal fly because it is composed of atoms, or because it has been shaped by skilled labor and technology?

For that matter, will you fly an airplane made "for the love of it" to Paris?

And do you see the future of aviation being made by people who craft airplanes for free?

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

(As for musicians not being harmed by music piracy, I suspect you could have a lively debate on that topic with the professional musicians in your life. Just because artists have managed to make a living around music piracy - not an easy task, as they could tell you - it doesn't mean no harm is done. Producing music costs tons of money, time and energy. When someone unconnected with that effort posts the results of it online and hundreds or thousands of people take it without giving anything back to the artists, trust me - harm is done.)

[triskadekaphile.livejournal.com]

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html