5 ms·

Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that? Back when Barnes and Noble was the big bo

Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that? Back when Barnes and Noble was the big book store, same thing, they pressured better prices. What do you do, split up the book store into two companies, who still control the same market share and will both still put pressure on the book companies? Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle prices, because it's considerably cheaper to sell a 12 meg file than a 200 page physical book. Which I agree with publishers, only benefits Amazon and not entirely fair, but for the most part, not much ahs changed, most kindle copies are MAYBE a dollar less.

mschuster91 9y ago
> Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that? In Germany, book prices are regulated: the printer sets the price, and the price the customer pays must be this price. Only exception are damaged (e.g. books with CD-ROM, but the CD is missing) or used books. The prices the retailers have to pay at the printer are of course different and may well be based on the # of books the retailer has purchased, but the system right now successfully prevents price wars. And yes, I am happy with that, because it ensures that authors get proper funding instead of having to fight for the scraps. > Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle prices, because it's considerably cheaper to sell a 12 meg file than a 200 page physical book The printing and distribution costs of a book are not that high, once you have a significant enough mass of books. What Amazon wants to do here is squeeze the authors off their profit, and this must be prevented. Books are culture, and culture must not be bowing to the demands of predatory capitalism or else we'll sooner or later live in a Idiocracy world with a movie called "*ss" the sole Oscar winner... (okay, that was an exaggeration, but still, it's a danger to culture!)
- Kocrachon 9y ago
  While it seems ideal, I don't like the idea of consumer goods being regulated outside of groceries and other necessities. My Raptor romance novel should not be 'regulated'.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    I suspect the author of a successful novel hopes for some form of regulation to help guarantee revenue from the effort.
    - Kocrachon 9y ago
      Can't that be said for every goods manufacturer? That would be like saying their needs to be regulation on the price of DVDs. Should we eliminate the 1 dollar DVD bin at WalMart now?
- taeric 9y ago
  I'm highly skeptical of the claim that printing and distribution costs are not that high. I get that they are not a high part of most publishers margins, but isn't that mainly because they have already invested in the infrastructure necessary to do these things. I would guess at a long timeline for deprecation write offs. This does not make them cheap, by any measure. (Indeed, just try printing a few thousand copies of a book personally, and see how small of a part of your margins this would be.) Same is similarly true for ebook distribution. It isn't like the infrastructure to do that at scale is free, either. Both in technical of copying the bits around, and in the physical of authors/editors/etc. However, I fail to see any way in which the advantages do not weigh in on the ebook side heavily.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Copyright is the much larger "danger to culture". We invented it to try to keep artistic recompense safe, but like most idealistic propositions, the sharks have moved in and gamed it and now we are all worse off. Allowing anyone to make any type of contribution without fear of a crackdown from Big Legal leads to a much more prosperous culture. This is already becoming reality as the internet has made traditional copyright completely unenforceable on the general population. For example, Adobe no longer sells Photoshop as a standalone unit, but as an ongoing subscription, which gives the impression that the vendor is an active participant in usage.
  - johncolanduoni 9y ago
    I've heard that the golden post-copyright era ushered in by the internet is coming for a long time, but all I've seen is indie game companies going out of business, games/applications including online features no matter how unnecessary, and much of Hollywood switching to a spitfire methodology. Not exactly advances for culture.
    - cookiecaper 9y ago
      I don't mean that the internet will create unbounded prosperity for authors or creators. We can see that its effect is in fact the opposite (large companies are only somewhat isolated from this by their massive legal war chests and latent political clout, derived from employing a significant portion of a representative's constituency). I mean that culture prospers more by allowing people to create and publish whatever iteration, derivation, or alteration they want than by ensuring a small group of well-moneyed "idea owners" can utilize the force of the state to monopolize significant cultural icons and stop people from going "too far" in their cultural iterations (that is, too likely to win the favor of the public as compared to the "owner's" offering; being too desirable and competitive). The viability of establishing a revenue stream from this cultural lather is separate from the value or existence of a fertile culture itself. Creation will always occur. Copyright is just a matter of how far those creations are allowed to grow and/or spread before they get crushed by someone else's bank account (which can have chilling effects on the back-end, preventing the incubation of certain ideas due to uncomfortable legal risk, but it won't stop the ideas from germinating). Culture is in a bad state when disseminating the wrong ideas in the wrong medium can result in the complete forfeiture of all earthly freedoms. If you sell T-shirts bearing Mickey Mouse's image without the permission of the "owner" of that cultural icon, you may very well find yourself not only deprived of your possessions through a costly legal battle (which you have lost before you begin), but potentially also deprived of your liberty when you're jailed for criminal copyright infringement. All because our concern for an active "culture" somehow translates into preventing derivatives, iterations, or improvements, blocking normal feedback and optimization processes and hopelessly distorting the market. Fanfic authors have been sued for getting too close to the "owner's" trademarks. It's an entirely unnatural state of affairs and it stifles our cultural maturity. Personally, I would suggest that people stop expecting passive IP-based revenue streams to cover them, because I don't think there is a lot of money in that down the road (because the internet makes it impossible to practically enforce copyright). You'll have to create a need for an ongoing service, paid for in small units, to get people to part with their money. Software vendors like Adobe have already accepted this.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  > What Amazon wants to do here is squeeze the authors off their profit, and this must be prevented. Authors typically get a 10-15% cut of print books. Amazon wants to squeeze the publishers off their profit. While they can be heavy-handed and exploitative, they are much less so than traditional publishing. It's not abnormal for an author to make more money of a $9.99 kindle sale than a $25 print sale.

mschuster91 9y ago

> Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that? In Germany, book prices are regulated: the printer sets the price, and the price the customer pays must be this price. Only exception are damaged (e.g. books with CD-ROM, but the CD is missing) or used books. The prices the retailers have to pay at the printer are of course different and may well be based on the # of books the retailer has purchased, but the system right now successfully prevents price wars. And yes, I am happy with that, because it ensures that authors get proper funding instead of having to fight for the scraps. > Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle prices, because it's considerably cheaper to sell a 12 meg file than a 200 page physical book The printing and distribution costs of a book are not that high, once you have a significant enough mass of books. What Amazon wants to do here is squeeze the authors off their profit, and this must be prevented. Books are culture, and culture must not be bowing to the demands of predatory capitalism or else we'll sooner or later live in a Idiocracy world with a movie called "*ss" the sole Oscar winner... (okay, that was an exaggeration, but still, it's a danger to culture!)

Kocrachon 9y ago
While it seems ideal, I don't like the idea of consumer goods being regulated outside of groceries and other necessities. My Raptor romance novel should not be 'regulated'.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  I suspect the author of a successful novel hopes for some form of regulation to help guarantee revenue from the effort.
  - Kocrachon 9y ago
    Can't that be said for every goods manufacturer? That would be like saying their needs to be regulation on the price of DVDs. Should we eliminate the 1 dollar DVD bin at WalMart now?
taeric 9y ago
I'm highly skeptical of the claim that printing and distribution costs are not that high. I get that they are not a high part of most publishers margins, but isn't that mainly because they have already invested in the infrastructure necessary to do these things. I would guess at a long timeline for deprecation write offs. This does not make them cheap, by any measure. (Indeed, just try printing a few thousand copies of a book personally, and see how small of a part of your margins this would be.) Same is similarly true for ebook distribution. It isn't like the infrastructure to do that at scale is free, either. Both in technical of copying the bits around, and in the physical of authors/editors/etc. However, I fail to see any way in which the advantages do not weigh in on the ebook side heavily.
cookiecaper 9y ago
Copyright is the much larger "danger to culture". We invented it to try to keep artistic recompense safe, but like most idealistic propositions, the sharks have moved in and gamed it and now we are all worse off. Allowing anyone to make any type of contribution without fear of a crackdown from Big Legal leads to a much more prosperous culture. This is already becoming reality as the internet has made traditional copyright completely unenforceable on the general population. For example, Adobe no longer sells Photoshop as a standalone unit, but as an ongoing subscription, which gives the impression that the vendor is an active participant in usage.
- johncolanduoni 9y ago
  I've heard that the golden post-copyright era ushered in by the internet is coming for a long time, but all I've seen is indie game companies going out of business, games/applications including online features no matter how unnecessary, and much of Hollywood switching to a spitfire methodology. Not exactly advances for culture.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    I don't mean that the internet will create unbounded prosperity for authors or creators. We can see that its effect is in fact the opposite (large companies are only somewhat isolated from this by their massive legal war chests and latent political clout, derived from employing a significant portion of a representative's constituency). I mean that culture prospers more by allowing people to create and publish whatever iteration, derivation, or alteration they want than by ensuring a small group of well-moneyed "idea owners" can utilize the force of the state to monopolize significant cultural icons and stop people from going "too far" in their cultural iterations (that is, too likely to win the favor of the public as compared to the "owner's" offering; being too desirable and competitive). The viability of establishing a revenue stream from this cultural lather is separate from the value or existence of a fertile culture itself. Creation will always occur. Copyright is just a matter of how far those creations are allowed to grow and/or spread before they get crushed by someone else's bank account (which can have chilling effects on the back-end, preventing the incubation of certain ideas due to uncomfortable legal risk, but it won't stop the ideas from germinating). Culture is in a bad state when disseminating the wrong ideas in the wrong medium can result in the complete forfeiture of all earthly freedoms. If you sell T-shirts bearing Mickey Mouse's image without the permission of the "owner" of that cultural icon, you may very well find yourself not only deprived of your possessions through a costly legal battle (which you have lost before you begin), but potentially also deprived of your liberty when you're jailed for criminal copyright infringement. All because our concern for an active "culture" somehow translates into preventing derivatives, iterations, or improvements, blocking normal feedback and optimization processes and hopelessly distorting the market. Fanfic authors have been sued for getting too close to the "owner's" trademarks. It's an entirely unnatural state of affairs and it stifles our cultural maturity. Personally, I would suggest that people stop expecting passive IP-based revenue streams to cover them, because I don't think there is a lot of money in that down the road (because the internet makes it impossible to practically enforce copyright). You'll have to create a need for an ongoing service, paid for in small units, to get people to part with their money. Software vendors like Adobe have already accepted this.
Dylan16807 9y ago
> What Amazon wants to do here is squeeze the authors off their profit, and this must be prevented. Authors typically get a 10-15% cut of print books. Amazon wants to squeeze the publishers off their profit. While they can be heavy-handed and exploitative, they are much less so than traditional publishing. It's not abnormal for an author to make more money of a $9.99 kindle sale than a $25 print sale.