7 ms·
Why can't the publishing industry just hurry up and die? They provide fewer and fewer valuable services as the marginal cost of content distribution approaches
by EvanAnderson 6y ago
Why can't the publishing industry just hurry up and die?
They provide fewer and fewer valuable services as the marginal cost of content distribution approaches zero and they just seem more like rent seekers.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoLuckily, this press release documents which publishers you shouldn't buy books from going forward. > Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House
- hedora 6y agoHere is a full list of members. If you have influence over them (springer, yale, acs, harvard press, university of california, Illinois, MOMA, etc), it would be reasonable to pressure them to withdraw their membership from the Association of American Publishers The list is here, but it takes multiple seconds to render each of the many pages: https://publishers.org/who-we-are/our-members/ https://publishers.org/who-we-are/our-members/ 1517 Media Academic Innovations Albert Whitman & Company American Anthropological Association (AAA) American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) American Chemical Society (ACS) American Dental Association Publishing (ADA) American Diabetes Association American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) American Medical Association (AMA) American Physical Society (APS) American Physiological Society, The (APS) American Psychological Association (APA) American Reading Company American School for Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) American Society for Indexing (ASI) American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) American Thoracic Society (ATS) American University in Cairo Press Applied Educational Systems Aquila Polonica (U.S.) LTD Bar Charts, Inc. Baylor University Press Benchmark Education Co. Berghahn Books Bernson LTD (Big Hat Press) BioZone USA Blooming Twig Books Bloomsbury USA BMJ Publishing Group Limited Bonnier Publishing USA British American Publishing Brookings Institution Press Burn House Publishing Cambridge Information Group (CIG) Cambridge University Press Catapult Caslon, Inc. Cato Institute Cengage Learning Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) Chronicle Books Cider Mill Press Book Publishers Columbia University Press City Lights Booksellers & Publishers Common Ground Research Network Crossway Davies Publishing Inc. Davis Publications Inc. Disney Publishing Worldwide Experiment, The F.A. Davis Company Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Fordham University Press General Conference of 7th-Day Adventists Georgetown University Press Georgia McBride Media Group Getty Publications GoodKnight Books Greystone Books Ltd Group Publishing Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Hachette Book Group Hansen Publishing HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide Harrington Park Press Harvard Business Review Group Harvard University Press Hogrefe Publishing Holiday House Inc. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Humanix Books Independent Institute, The INFORMS International Monetary Fund (IMF) InterVarsity Press John Hunt Publishing John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Johns Hopkins University Press The Journal of American Academy of Business (JAABC) Judson Press Kappa Delta Pi Kodansha USA Libros Publishing Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc Macmillan Massachusetts Medical Society Materials Research Forum McGraw Hill Education MedMaster Inc Melville House Michigan State University Press Moody Publishers Morgan & Claypool Publishers Morton Publishing Company Museum of Modern Art , The (MOMA) National Academies Press Naval Institute Press New World Library NY Media Works, LLC NYU Press Oak Knoll Press Okapi Educational Publishing, Inc. Oncology Nursing Society Optical Society of America (OSA) Oxford University Press Penguin Random House Pennsylvania State University Press Princeton University Press Pushkin Press Quirk Books RELX Group Riverdale Avenue Books Rosen Publishing Group SAGE Publications Scholastic Testing Service, Inc Scholastic, Inc. Simon & Schuster Social Studies School Service Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Springer Publishing Company Stanford University Press Story Plant, The Tanglewood Publishing, Inc. Taylor and Francis Group Teachers College Press Teacher Created Materials Thames & Hudson World Bank, The Trialtea USA, LLC Turner Publishing Company University of Alaska Press University of California Press University of Chicago Press University of Illinois Press University of Massachusetts Press University of Minnesota Press University of North Carolina Press University of Pennsylvania Press University of Texas Press University of Wisconsin Press University Press of Colorado W. W. Norton & Company Walter de Gruyter, Inc. Wesleyan University Press White House Historical Association Wisconsin Historical Society Press Wolters Kluwer Health- Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins Workman Publishing Company Yale University Press YBK Publishers Pearson American Federation of Arts American College of Cardiology Imbrifex Books Waterhouse Press
- falcolas 6y agoIMO, so long as they offer pre-payment for books, they will remain in existence. Prolific and profitable authors benefit from being paid ahead of time for their work, which can often take months or years.
- munk-a 6y agoI feel like that role is just waiting to be taken over by a kickstarter like model though.
- falcolas 6y agoIt is happening (I recently got a kickstarted atlas of Mars - how fricking cool is that?!). But then the authors also have to do their own marketing and promotion, another care taken over by the publishers for these few authors.
- simias 6y agoAnd editing. Good editing can be very important. There's a lot of "R&D" work being done by publishers, I don't think it's fair to equate them to a glorified kickstarter. Same goes for music studios and movie producers. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- falcolas 6y agoAgreed. I'm doing some amateur proofreading for a hobby, and it's a lot of work to properly proofread large bodies of text.
- mcguire 6y agoQuick question: what is the budget for marketing and promotion for the average published book?
- guidoism 6y agoIt is for some authors. The bigger problem is that artists or developers or whatever need to pay the rent and buy food while they are in the process of creating. UBI would fully transform that industry.
- dehrmann 6y ago> They provide fewer and fewer valuable services as the marginal cost of content distribution approaches zero I'd argue this makes their services more important to writers because when anyone can publish content, you have to work harder to stand out from the crowd.
- somebrody 6y ago> when anyone can publish content, you have to work harder to stand out from the crowd. Anyone can publish to YouTube and you can see the likes, comments, and subscribes. Seems pretty easy to stand out.
- StormChaser_5 6y agoAs a self published author I have to say that the publishing industry is providing a huge service to me and the rest of the industry here. The IA blatantly stole the work of thousands of people. They saw a problem and wanted to act - laudable. They could have done that be arranging to buy unique copies of each book they lent out. Or they could have tried to come to some agreement with the publishers. Or a bunch of other alternatives. They didnt. They stole the work and thankfully there is some players with enough clout in the market to do something about it. If the big publishers ever do go away it will be a bad time for those like me who are never going to make enough revenue from our works to warrant a court proceeding while our works are stolen.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoThey didn't "steal" anything. If you mean copyright infringement, say "copyright infringement". There's no scarcity involved-- nobody lost the use or ownership of any physical article-- so nothing was "stolen". re: your business model being sustainable if the current "industry" goes away - Maybe that ship has sailed. You can't make a living being a buggy whip manufacturer or an elevator operator anymore either.
- jfk13 6y ago> nobody lost the use or ownership of any physical article Presumably the author and/or publisher lost the use of the income they could reasonably have expected to receive corresponding to a certain number of copies of the work going into circulation. Anyhow, physical articles are not the only things that can be stolen.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoEach act of copyright infringement does not equate to a lost sale. We have a term for copyright infringement. We have a term for unlawfully taking things that are subject to scarcity. They are two different things. The lack of scarcity matters.
- zucker42 6y ago
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoAs long as people conflate the last step's marginal cost with the amortized cost of making a thing that ends up in your hands, we're gonna be stuck arguing about this.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoThere are certainly expenses incurred by the publisher that have nothing to do with the physical articles. It seems like the marginal cost of the "last step" cost is still a very significant component, though. High-touch sales channels, handling returns (consignment sales), and co-promotion expenses all seem tightly coupled to that "last step" and sales of physical articles.
- ghaff 6y agoIt's been a while since I've looked at it but, basically, the cost of the physical article is a smaller slice of the pie than many think. There was a lot of discussion about this when e-books first got big and weren't that much cheaper than mass market or trade paperbacks. As I recall, the number was around $2/copy.
- boplicity 6y ago> Why can't the publishing industry just hurry up and die? Yeah, let's get rid of all the authors, newspapers, magazines, journalists, etc. I mean, what does the publishing industry even do? It serves no value! And the gall they have to actually try to protect their work and make a living from it? Ridiculous!
- EvanAnderson 6y agoI was being hyperbolic, to be sure. After dealing with decades of "intellectual property" industries waging war against general purpose computing I'm heavily biased against their interests. The amount of needless complexity I've had to deal with, and money I've seen wasted, service of DRM fills me with a simmering rage. They burned much of their goodwill with me a long time ago. Perhaps I take it too personally, but it certainly feels personal when the things I want to do with technology I own are thwarted in the name of serving DRM. I'm exceedingly frustrated at the concessions made for owners of "intellectual property" in copyright law, too. I'm particularly miffed by egregiously long copyright terms. These terms prevent derivative works from being made in a culturally-relevant timescale. They prevent the copying of "unprofitable" works that lack mass market appeal and become "out of print". They send orphan works in a legal limbo that prevents their use for fear of litigation. They hold back the progress of "science and the useful arts" for the benefit of incumbent owners by creating a barrier to entry. They create little incentive for new works to be created. I'm frustrated that the "intellectual property" industry has worked to brainwash the public into believing that the public domain is the exception, instead of the default. They've promoted a believe to creators that their works need to be "owned" by rent seeking middlemen. They've sold a moral argument about creators being deprived of their compensation. St the same time, they use "creative" accounting practices to divert compensation away from creators. All of that frustration fuels my hyperbole. We live in a world with ubiquitous copying machines with ubiquitous connectivity. That genie can't be put back in its bottle. It can't be legislated away without ending up in a dystopian "Right to Read"[1] future. From where I stand the "intellectual property" industries want the "Right to Read" future, to the detriment of the good computing provides to humanity. Rather than change their business models and cope with a new reality, the "intellectual property" industries claw fitfully at whatever legislative means they can to preserve their dying business models. Perhaps it'll take a generation or two dying off before we can come up with new business models that'll make this all irrelevant. I don't have the answers, but I really think that "don't use technology to do what it does best" is a very viable answer. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html