tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22165230.post4524608505794859453..comments2023-12-16T16:50:25.810-08:00Comments on The Heart of the Matter: Publishing Establishment: "Okay, We Suck, But Amazon Might Be Worse!"Barry Eislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17785333622697500192noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22165230.post-37493854744025449912014-09-26T22:55:03.143-07:002014-09-26T22:55:03.143-07:00The big barrier in competing against the Big 5 isn...The big barrier in competing against the Big 5 isn&#39;t getting the books printed (although doing that at a profitable-enough margin is a significant barrier).<br /><br />It&#39;s getting your books into the prospective customer&#39;s hands. <br /><br />(Aside: Things are a pain in the neck. Things have to be made; they have to be stored in an environment conducive to keeping them intact; they have to be shipped from manufacturing to point of sale. Costly, and also SLOW--and time is money.)<br /><br />If you&#39;re printing dead tree books, customers want to crack it open in the store and look at the first chapter. And that means getting a deal with the distributors to get it into bookstores. That might not be possible.<br /><br />Ebooks don&#39;t have this limitation--you can let the customer preview it on their tablet or ereader, no problem. An indie ebook publisher is, AT WORST, on a level playing field against the legacy publishers. Usually, they&#39;re in a better position.<br /><br />The big challenge in going up against Amazon is computing infrastructure--but that&#39;s fast becoming a commodity product with all manner of options for IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, along with a bunch of other acronyms (including, for all I know, Acronyms as a Service, or AaaS. No, I&#39;m not going to tell you how to pronounce it.)<br /><br />If you&#39;re sufficiently cheeky, you can rent some cloud from Amazon itself to host your competing-with-Amazon (Amazon as a Service?) infrastructure.<br /><br />I don&#39;t worry about the future of publishing. It&#39;s going to change--but I am convinced it will change for the better. <br /><br />The great miracle of the Internet is the basic nature of the thing: it is a communications system that is designed to not have gatekeepers. <br /><br />The middleman can only exist in a communications-limited environment--because his only job is to keep the actual parties to the transaction from talking directly to each other. That&#39;s not necessary, nor even very useful.<br /><br />The Big 5 built their entire enterprise around an idea that started becoming obsolete in the 1950s, with the rise of digital communications systems. They&#39;re dead men walking. And they end&#39;s going to come with breathtaking speed. A lot of people will be hurt--nobody likes getting their rice bowl busted--but a lot more will benefit.Ken Prescotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13779589712239613030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22165230.post-46017206196169112072014-09-25T23:21:08.098-07:002014-09-25T23:21:08.098-07:00Mr. Prescott, I&#39;m not sure that&#39;s true, a...Mr. Prescott,<br /><br />I&#39;m not sure that&#39;s true, anymore, about barriers to entry. Witness WMG Pub.<br /><br />The only significant barrier I see right now is non-US printing of books. If there was a network of PoD services, and you could send files to be printed, at the same standard, in France or Taiwan or Brazil, things might change, again. I think it&#39;ll come to that.<br /><br />Beisdes that, the barrier is IP. I know readers are not supposed to care about publisher, *but* there&#39;s a certain... &quot;Oh, these guys are new, let&#39;s see what else they have&quot;, maybe specially in genres.<br /><br />Do big publishers have better margins with big printings? Sure. But that&#39;s not a barrier, and I&#39;m not sure it doesn&#39;t push them wrong, as in they might better look for profit if they didn&#39;t have those margins &quot;built in&quot;.<br /><br />Take care.shugyoshahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04437800091500543886noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22165230.post-68381745676319607902014-09-25T14:30:23.889-07:002014-09-25T14:30:23.889-07:00Any competitor&#39;s barrier to entry against Amaz...Any competitor&#39;s barrier to entry against Amazon is a lot lower than the barrier to entry against a dead tree publisher. That fact alone will encourage better behavior on Amazon&#39;s part.<br /><br />Will the terms change? Of course they will, as the market evolves and changes. And it always does. New competitors will arise; someone well-established in the biz will make a fatally bad misstep. Will the readers notice? Maybe, maybe not. Will they care? Probably not.<br /><br />Heck, a sufficiently ruthless Big 5 CEO could revitalize his company&#39;s fortunes right now by bringing his business processes into the 21st century. They&#39;ll pay higher royalties to get authors on board, but make massively more money and lose a lot less of it. All it takes is one CEO deciding to break the cycle of decline, and the rest will follow his path, or blaze others.<br /><br />Change in inevitable, unless you&#39;re dealing with a vending machine.Ken Prescotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13779589712239613030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22165230.post-30455440160274266562014-09-25T10:35:22.273-07:002014-09-25T10:35:22.273-07:00The central theme of the graphic novel Watchman wa...The central theme of the graphic novel Watchman was that the only way mankind would stop destroying itself is if it united against an alien threat.<br /><br />Maybe. But an alien threat doesn&#39;t excuse all of the violence, war, rape, torture, slavery, and inhumanity we&#39;ve inflicted on one another.<br /><br />In this case, rallying against Amazon isn&#39;t an excuse to get everyone to treat each other better; it&#39;s an excuse to let the subjugation of writers continue. Even worse, it&#39;s asking those writers to participate in their own subjugation because of some perceived future threat.<br /><br />Nope. No thanks.JA Konrathhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08778324558755151986noreply@blogger.com
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