31 ms·

Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

285 points by GavinB 15y ago

bluedanieru 15y ago
They're using their platform to get into publishing, not making the industry obsolete as the title (and the article) imply.
- mynameishere 15y ago
  Traditional publishing is the scurviest thing you'll ever meet in a lifetime. Basically, in traditional publishing you do: The writing. The editing. The marketing. ...and they pick up 98 percent of the profits, if any. With self-publishing (not just amazon) typically over 50 percent off the bottom goes to the author. This is an absolute necessary change to the industry. It will result in 2 or 3 fewer JK Rowlings, but 100s of thousands fewer outrages.
  - 0x44 15y ago
    I do not know what experience you have with traditional publishing, but Charles Stross (cstross here on HN) wrote a series of blog posts[1] that explain rather in detail the benefits of publishing through a traditional publisher instead of doing it yourself. It isn't nearly so tangibly one-sided as you would suggest. [1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...
    - ChuckMcM 15y ago
      I read Charlie's posts too, this is an area I am really interested in, and I think he missed out on a number of things. As with any business there are 'good' publishers and 'bad' publishers, and the Amazon move (and others like it) could lead to less friction in the publishing business which will certainly boost quantity but it may (as Charlie posits) negatively effect quality as well. The future may end up being 'karmic gods' to coin a phrase, kind of like kingmakers of old but people or organizations which, by applying a seal of approval or blessing on a work can immediately levitate it above the sea of choices, which will replace what 'publishers' do today. These people may appear to be 'super - Agents' as I've heard them referred to or 'pressless publishers' (a take on fabless semiconductor companies which already have a model that works well for them). We should see artisan printers arising. Its a new business where you work with an author/agent to have exclusive right to put into physical form a work, perhaps leather bound on acid free paper or glue bound onto newsprint. Amazon has an excellent chance of continuing to disrupt here and kill publishers outright. Certainly the disruption in the market is going to move around where the money goes and it will affect the net total value of a given work. Much of that value may simply disappear (which is to say authors make more and consumers pay less but a giant middle-industry no longer exists so those folks don't get salaries and their suppliers don't sell product etc etc). The economics of information march relentlessly on.
      - patio11 15y ago
        In 2011, all the big publishers are pressless publishers. They don't edit books. They don't print books. They don't write books. They don't market books. They just fund books, at terms which would shock the conscience if they weren't so well-established. (If a book was a startup, the typical offer is something like "We'll put in $5k at a pre-money valuation of $1k and, by the way, we're going to claw that $5k back, too. Also, we're going to contractually lock you up from talking to other investors for your next three companies. You owe it to us, because we're rescuing you from not being published.") I will not mourn their passing, as either a reader or an oft-suggested author.
        cfn 15y ago
        So true. I know someone that self-published a book and made a few thousand dollars with that first edition. That small success ended up a contract with a large publisher for the second edition. She did all the writing, editing and DTP. The publisher took care of the cover and the printing. She did not get an advance from them since she was unknown and, several years later, she still did not earn a single penny from that second edition.
  - gruen 15y ago
    It's not exactly 98% of the profits; but, it still seems egregious. From what I've noticed, royalties are generally about 10% of gross against advances (if any), or $1 on a $10 soft-cover. The publisher spends money on the acquisition, editing, printing, and distribution; in brick-and-morter land, this isn't cheap. Remember that the store needs to make a couple of bucks, too. Additionally, major retailers include a buyback clause—if the book doesn't sell, the retailer can sell up to something like 15% of the initial purchase order back to the publisher. The publisher often forwards your share of that burden into your royalty payment schedule. Though, ultimately, while authors might get screwed financially in a lot of ways, publishing does, as a consumer, keep a lot of crap out of your purchasing decisions. Publishers (on the whole) do provide a lot of value to you: are you going to buy Gruen's AWESOME guide to Ruby or The Ruby Programming Language from O'Reilly Publishing with its venerable woodcut cover treatment? If you're trying to get your work out there (which is why people write in the first place) you're probably willing to take the traditional publishing deal.
    - jeremymcanally 15y ago
      The annoying thing about being charged for returns is that you have no control over how many are ordered. When my book Ruby in Practice went to stores, I felt like there were FAR too many copies going out. Lo and behold, tons of them came back and now I'm eternally on the hook for the cost of those even though I had zero input into how many were actually produced and distributed. Publishers are helpful, but the game is inextricably rigged in their favor, which sucks.
      - gruen 15y ago
        Author contracts are the worst. Agents can help, but unless you're at scale, their cost/benefit is a wash. We should compare notes.
    - chromatic 15y ago
      From what I've noticed, royalties are generally about 10% of gross against advances (if any), or $1 on a $10 soft-cover. More like $0.50 on a $10 soft-cover--the wholesale discount is likely somewhere between 40 and 55%.
muhfuhkuh 15y ago
I've read various things from writers about Amazon's publishing deals. They have AmazonEncore, which republishes and promotes emerging authors and mid-listers with self-published novels, giving them an extremely generous (compared to the Big NY Five) cut of the proceeds for every book sold on Kindle. Of course, for indie publishers in general, if you sell your ebook for over US$2.99 in the Kindle bookstore, you keep 70%. Same with Nook Bookstore. Seth Godin self-publishes by this method. Stephen King publishes short stories and novelas through Kindle Singles, a more curated kindle publishing vehicle that publishes short essays, longer journalistic pieces, and short fiction that gives authors a 70% cut regardless of the author's set price. Being the #1 bookseller and ereader manufacturer is faring very well for Amazon.
- jseliger 15y ago
  It's not bad for a lot writers, either, so far, at least compared to traditional publishing. I wrote a longish post on the subject: http://jseliger.com/2011/10/17/on-amazon-signs-up-authors-writing-publishers-out-of-deal/ http://jseliger.com/2011/10/17/on-amazon-signs-up-authors-wr... which explains why I might end up as one of those self-published writers: it's not just the economics of publishing right now, but the difficulty of even getting published at all if you're a classic outsider. The desperate will use whatever cheap and quick methods they can to get their work out there. Yeah, 99% of that work will be lousy, but the unrecognized good stuff will be there too.
timjahn 15y ago
More and more, the middlemen in every industry are starting to realize just how irrelevant they are.
- mtraven 15y ago
  Amazon's not a middleman? Of course they are, they just happen to be the biggest one, capable of eating all the others.
  - bennesvig 15y ago
    There have always been two levels of middle men in the book business. The publishers and the sellers. This eliminates one big middle man.
    - Samuel_Michon 15y ago
      By calling them middlemen, you're implying that publishers add no value to the end product. That's a misconception: an author writes a manuscript, a publisher makes it into a book. Often, it takes as much time and effort to turn a manuscript into a book as it took the author to write the manuscript. As more writers choose to self publish ebooks, it's becoming quite clear how crucial the role of a publisher is. Most of those self produced 'books' are completely unreadable. Charlie Stross explained it well: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h... Also, Amazon isn't taking publishers out of the equation. It's becoming one.
      - tjmc 15y ago
        Everyone who voted the parent comment down because it offended their groupthink should read the forwards of a few books. Authors constantly sing the praises of editors who helped them get their books into shape. Good producers do the same thing to music. This meme that there are no benefits to professional production is demonstrably stupid. If you're unable to leave it on Reddit or Slashdot where it belongs, at least have the courtesy not to mod down people who say otherwise.
Hitchhiker 15y ago
Marc's on the game http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...
ghurlman 15y ago
Barnes & Noble's has a publishing house of their own for a while; I'm surprised it's taken Amazon this long.
- shadowsun7 15y ago
  Amazon has been launching imprints for the last year or so, including romance imprint Montlake Romance, thriller imprint Thomas & Mercer, and most recently sci-fi imprint 47North. Nothing new here, this article has been a long time coming.
padobson 15y ago
Books are great - and certainly more cost effective for someone like Amazon to go straight to the content creators. I would like to see them do the same with music and video, but that costs a bit more to produce. There are a number of middlemen out there that need stronger competition from alternate sales channels. Big NY publishers are just a subset of incumbents holding on to a dying business model that need a good shot of disruption.
- jwallaceparker 15y ago
  They've started Amazon Studios which is already heading down the road of competing with other Hollywood production companies.
  - michaelfeathers 15y ago
    At what point does this end up touching anti-trust?
ilamont 15y ago
I think publishers will still have a lot of strength in niche areas/specialization, areas in which Amazon can't effectively scale. That is, unless it starts recruiting editorial staff or begins partnering with smaller publishers in those areas.
wicknicks 15y ago
This had to happen sooner or later. I can't help but feel sad at how some content owners have been sticking to old school technology for decades without trying out new opportunities. Publishers will soon be replaced with such 'distributors' soon. Today its books, tomorrow someone will come along and do this to the music industry.
brady747 15y ago
My father (about 5+ years ago when itunes was picking up steam) thought Apple would sign Madonna and several other big artists and start producing music themselves. I guess he was just off by brand name and a good number of years ahead of the curve with the idea, but its exciting to see this change happening.
alanh 15y ago
Hello, obvious future!
FD3SA 15y ago
Why do I suddenly get the sense that no amount of stimulus funding is going to solve the structural unemployment issue in the USA? We appear to have crossed the technology Rubicon, whereupon the ratio of jobs created to jobs destroyed by technology becomes less than unity. The Luddite fallacy only holds true as long as the ratio is above or at unity. Interesting times.
- TylerE 15y ago
  That's been true for a looong time. Remember when offices had typing pools and messenger boys?
- morrow 15y ago
  http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_... I agree that it won't be fixed by stimulus - but it's because I believe that the current system is undergoing a form of violent restructuring, where current institutions and platforms are fighting for their survival against a tidal shift that's moving from a society dominated by centralized, few, powerful institutions, to decentralized, numerous, systems and platforms of democratic organization. I think what makes technology an always doubted, yet positive, force is that the rate of change and the instability it causes makes short term guesses easier to make successfully than longer term ones. For example, at the birth of the cell-phone, it's easier to predict that this new tech will kill off the pay-phone industry than it is to predict the future coming of the iPhone, or app stores, or the market 3d cell-phone cameras. It's easier to look at the current landscape, and predict how this new tech will damage it, than it is to look at a blank slate, and predict what of an infinite number of possibilities will actually work in the newly created space.
  - DanielBMarkham 15y ago
    It's also easy to step back until something good comes of it, focus on just the good, and ignore the bad. Take your cell phone example. Cell phones are allowing the government to track the location of all it's citizens. Without a warrant in some cases. If somebody would have predicted that back when cellphones were introduced, people would have laughed them out of town. It was a ludicrous and paranoid idea. Yet here we are. We sit around watching videos, liking Facebook comments, and checking in at various events, all while a critical part of our anonymity has been destroyed. I'm not saying it's all bad. I'm saying there is a mix. If you ask me, I'd rather not have cell phones and have a more private life. No amount of slick packaging and voice control interfaces is going to make up for what I've lost. But we don't have to choose, of course. We can have our cake and eat it too. What's happened is that technology is staying leaps and bounds ahead of politics. It's like we're having to re-engineer the social contract every couple of decades or so. And the yahoos we have in power around the world are much more interested in their petty political games than this seismic shift that's occurring under them (which, in all honesty, they probably don't understand and probably couldn't deal with anyway). So the system gets more and more out of whack. Just wanted to balance what you were saying. This isn't a story of technology always making things better even though we sometimes doubt. It's a story of technology making things more complicated and making the individual more powerful in some ways and that having effects that we poorly understand.
kanenathan213 15y ago
Finally. Now somebody just needs to do this for academic papers that taxpayers pay for and leech publishers profit from.
- william42 15y ago
  http://www.plos.org/ http://www.plos.org/
ck2 15y ago
Who is the --AA of the publishing industry, obviously they have far few legal protections for their schemes.
epo 15y ago
Amazon is an old-fashioned monopolist. When dealing with these beasts they are your friend until it is more profitable for them not to be. JK Rowling does not require Amazon but Amazon will never produce another JK Rowling because they will not do the marketing and groundwork necessary. Authors are investing in their future when choosing commercial partners. By partnering with Amazon they could be putting all their eggs in one basket, this is not necessarily a bad thing to do but it does require that you watch that basket very carefully.
- dlss 15y ago
  > implying JK Rowling was produced by a publisher Source? You don't think JK would have produced at the same quality with a different publisher? Or if she had borrowed money, paid her own editor, and self-published?
  - epo 15y ago
    She was famously flat broke, I doubt she could have borrowed money or done any of the other things to get traction. What she got from her publisher was marketing, contacts, distribution of review copies ... (it certainly wasn't editing). Big famous authors are not going to go with Amazon, they can self publish (c.f. Zappa, Radiohead). Smaller authors are not going to get effort put into them and are better off buying lottery tickets than relying on Amazon for career development. The people do who do the work Amazon won't do? Publishers.
- rmc 15y ago
  Amazon will never produce another JK Rowling Yes they can. They don't need a widely popular children book about magic and wizards that gets lots of children excited. All they need are loads of books to sell that people want to buy. Will Amazon shut down their eBook business if JK Rowling doesn't sign up? No. That should tell you how much Amazon need JK Rowling.
  - nobody314159 15y ago
    It's EASIER for Amazon produce a JK Rowling. You sign up 10-100-1000 childrens writers, it costs you almost nothing. Then if one of them starts to get any traction through reviews, blogs, slashdotting etc you can very quickly and easily promote the hell out of them by simply putting them on the front page of Amazon.com or pushing suggested books at your customers. Compare that to traditional publisher - it has to pick one author and spend a lot of time and money sending them on signing tours, book shop promotions, getting reviews in the NYT. So they have to spend 90% of it's money on the existing big names to be sure of a return.
sathishmanohar 15y ago
Next in the list is Music Labels. Go Digital Companies.
richardw 15y ago
I've always been amazed that all the publishers never got together and said "let's build our own web store". I understand that it's not simple, but the alternative is to have Amazon disintermediate you at some point.
- eftpotrm 15y ago
  Why did the record labels not put together a RIAA-controlled iTunes well before Apple did? Or the movie studios an MPAA download store before Netflix? One, they've got a lot invested in the current model, which is primarily priced around selling medium rather than content - http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html. Two, they've spent years learning to compete and regard their biggest threats as each other. They're not culturally equipped to work together to combat a transformational challenge.
  - richardw 15y ago
    RIAA didn't want music delivered electronically, and iTunes got them over that hump. They could not have thought of that themselves. However, an online book store selling the same products you have for a hundred years is a much easier sell. You aren't harming your existing business, you're extending it from publishing to distribution and sales. That's just vertical integration - quite well-understood as a business technique. The tricky part is the touchy-feely web aspect (since that they understand publishing and are very close to distribution already). So given the amount of money they stand to lose, I have no doubt they could have made it work. Undercut the prices everyone else has to charge and you create a serious incentive for people to try you out, forgive your mistakes and give you 5 years to slowly figure out how to perfect the model.
acabal 15y ago
I've been reading about the imminent death of publishers for a while now, but I don't think they're ever going to disappear completely. And I run a site for writers that processes hundreds of manuscripts daily. People like to make the comparison of the inevitable democratization of books to how the internet changed the music industry, but that's just not an apt comparison. Books cannot be consumed in the same way as music. Pop songs are usually 2-3 minutes long, and an entire album clocks in at half an hour to an hour. Generally you can listen to a few songs from a band and make a decision as to whether you like their style and want to buy the album on the spot. Books aren't like that. A reader must often invest a significant amount of time--days--before it becomes clear that a book is or isn't good. Publishers provide the extremely valuable service of validation. If you get your book published up by Random House, then the reader at the store can say, if absolutely nothing else, that a group of well-read professionals thought your book was good enough to warrant stamping with their brand and spending money polishing and marketing. You just can't say that about 99% of self-published material, and when it can take days for a reader to determine quality, that distinction becomes important. And, despite what many would lead you to believe, publishers provide a valuable service besides validation. They take a raw manuscript and polish it up to professional standards. The manuscript is only part of the finished product that we call a book. You also need cover art, which is your book's first impression and incredibly important--not something you want to leave to your 18-year-old nephew with a cracked copy of Photoshop. You need typesetting, which is still important in the digital world: how many middle-aged writers know--or want to learn--HTML/CSS? You need editing. Having run a site for writers I can guarantee you that an author's perfect final manuscript is still filled with typos, mistakes, and ripe for polishing from a trained professional. You need marketing: the best book in the world won't get read if nobody knows it exists. The truth is that writers are good at writing, but often not that good at all of the other aspects of publishing a book. A big publisher takes that off their hands and handles it in a professional way. I suspect that the people who say publishers are dead have themselves never picked up a random indie author's book from Amazon. If they had, they'd realize that not every author is Amanda Hocking or Scott Sigler. In fact they'd probably realize that what they just read was filled with typos, had shitty cover art, maybe had greater structural problems like weak characterization, and likely was priced just about right at 99 cents. If anything, the death of publishers could be very dangerous, because when young new readers start getting burned by crappy self-published books, they'll get turned off to reading and we'll have lost yet another generation to TV and fast media.
deleted 15y ago
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roqetman 15y ago
I wonder if there could be a model where an author releases a "beta" version of their book at a cheaper price and then "fixes" suggested by readers are then released for free to those who bought the original. A kind of group editing. A later version 1 could be released at a higher price for those who don't want to deal with errors.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  I wonder if there could be a model where an author releases a "beta" version of their book at a cheaper price and then "fixes" suggested by readers are then released for free to those who bought the original. A kind of group editing. These days, a lot of writers write alpha versions as blog posts. Commenters and other bloggers provide suggestions of fixes.
g2link 15y ago
This may be the final death knell for the publishing industry but it also indirectly provides a clear description of how Internet empowered businesses can be fatally disruptive. The quote that has to be burning holes in the stomachs of publishing pros everywhere comes from Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti: “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.” http://g2li.me/ppkHhM http://g2li.me/ppkHhM

285 points by GavinB 15y ago

They're using their platform to get into publishing, not making the industry obsolete as the title (and the article) imply.

mynameishere 15y ago
Traditional publishing is the scurviest thing you'll ever meet in a lifetime. Basically, in traditional publishing you do: The writing. The editing. The marketing. ...and they pick up 98 percent of the profits, if any. With self-publishing (not just amazon) typically over 50 percent off the bottom goes to the author. This is an absolute necessary change to the industry. It will result in 2 or 3 fewer JK Rowlings, but 100s of thousands fewer outrages.
- 0x44 15y ago
  I do not know what experience you have with traditional publishing, but Charles Stross (cstross here on HN) wrote a series of blog posts[1] that explain rather in detail the benefits of publishing through a traditional publisher instead of doing it yourself. It isn't nearly so tangibly one-sided as you would suggest. [1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    I read Charlie's posts too, this is an area I am really interested in, and I think he missed out on a number of things. As with any business there are 'good' publishers and 'bad' publishers, and the Amazon move (and others like it) could lead to less friction in the publishing business which will certainly boost quantity but it may (as Charlie posits) negatively effect quality as well. The future may end up being 'karmic gods' to coin a phrase, kind of like kingmakers of old but people or organizations which, by applying a seal of approval or blessing on a work can immediately levitate it above the sea of choices, which will replace what 'publishers' do today. These people may appear to be 'super - Agents' as I've heard them referred to or 'pressless publishers' (a take on fabless semiconductor companies which already have a model that works well for them). We should see artisan printers arising. Its a new business where you work with an author/agent to have exclusive right to put into physical form a work, perhaps leather bound on acid free paper or glue bound onto newsprint. Amazon has an excellent chance of continuing to disrupt here and kill publishers outright. Certainly the disruption in the market is going to move around where the money goes and it will affect the net total value of a given work. Much of that value may simply disappear (which is to say authors make more and consumers pay less but a giant middle-industry no longer exists so those folks don't get salaries and their suppliers don't sell product etc etc). The economics of information march relentlessly on.
    - patio11 15y ago
      In 2011, all the big publishers are pressless publishers. They don't edit books. They don't print books. They don't write books. They don't market books. They just fund books, at terms which would shock the conscience if they weren't so well-established. (If a book was a startup, the typical offer is something like "We'll put in $5k at a pre-money valuation of $1k and, by the way, we're going to claw that $5k back, too. Also, we're going to contractually lock you up from talking to other investors for your next three companies. You owe it to us, because we're rescuing you from not being published.") I will not mourn their passing, as either a reader or an oft-suggested author.
      - cfn 15y ago
        So true. I know someone that self-published a book and made a few thousand dollars with that first edition. That small success ended up a contract with a large publisher for the second edition. She did all the writing, editing and DTP. The publisher took care of the cover and the printing. She did not get an advance from them since she was unknown and, several years later, she still did not earn a single penny from that second edition.
- gruen 15y ago
  It's not exactly 98% of the profits; but, it still seems egregious. From what I've noticed, royalties are generally about 10% of gross against advances (if any), or $1 on a $10 soft-cover. The publisher spends money on the acquisition, editing, printing, and distribution; in brick-and-morter land, this isn't cheap. Remember that the store needs to make a couple of bucks, too. Additionally, major retailers include a buyback clause—if the book doesn't sell, the retailer can sell up to something like 15% of the initial purchase order back to the publisher. The publisher often forwards your share of that burden into your royalty payment schedule. Though, ultimately, while authors might get screwed financially in a lot of ways, publishing does, as a consumer, keep a lot of crap out of your purchasing decisions. Publishers (on the whole) do provide a lot of value to you: are you going to buy Gruen's AWESOME guide to Ruby or The Ruby Programming Language from O'Reilly Publishing with its venerable woodcut cover treatment? If you're trying to get your work out there (which is why people write in the first place) you're probably willing to take the traditional publishing deal.
  - jeremymcanally 15y ago
    The annoying thing about being charged for returns is that you have no control over how many are ordered. When my book Ruby in Practice went to stores, I felt like there were FAR too many copies going out. Lo and behold, tons of them came back and now I'm eternally on the hook for the cost of those even though I had zero input into how many were actually produced and distributed. Publishers are helpful, but the game is inextricably rigged in their favor, which sucks.
    - gruen 15y ago
      Author contracts are the worst. Agents can help, but unless you're at scale, their cost/benefit is a wash. We should compare notes.
  - chromatic 15y ago
    From what I've noticed, royalties are generally about 10% of gross against advances (if any), or $1 on a $10 soft-cover. More like $0.50 on a $10 soft-cover--the wholesale discount is likely somewhere between 40 and 55%.

muhfuhkuh 15y ago

I've read various things from writers about Amazon's publishing deals. They have AmazonEncore, which republishes and promotes emerging authors and mid-listers with self-published novels, giving them an extremely generous (compared to the Big NY Five) cut of the proceeds for every book sold on Kindle. Of course, for indie publishers in general, if you sell your ebook for over US$2.99 in the Kindle bookstore, you keep 70%. Same with Nook Bookstore. Seth Godin self-publishes by this method. Stephen King publishes short stories and novelas through Kindle Singles, a more curated kindle publishing vehicle that publishes short essays, longer journalistic pieces, and short fiction that gives authors a 70% cut regardless of the author's set price. Being the #1 bookseller and ereader manufacturer is faring very well for Amazon.

jseliger 15y ago
It's not bad for a lot writers, either, so far, at least compared to traditional publishing. I wrote a longish post on the subject: http://jseliger.com/2011/10/17/on-amazon-signs-up-authors-writing-publishers-out-of-deal/ http://jseliger.com/2011/10/17/on-amazon-signs-up-authors-wr... which explains why I might end up as one of those self-published writers: it's not just the economics of publishing right now, but the difficulty of even getting published at all if you're a classic outsider. The desperate will use whatever cheap and quick methods they can to get their work out there. Yeah, 99% of that work will be lousy, but the unrecognized good stuff will be there too.

timjahn 15y ago

More and more, the middlemen in every industry are starting to realize just how irrelevant they are.

mtraven 15y ago
Amazon's not a middleman? Of course they are, they just happen to be the biggest one, capable of eating all the others.
- bennesvig 15y ago
  There have always been two levels of middle men in the book business. The publishers and the sellers. This eliminates one big middle man.
  - Samuel_Michon 15y ago
    By calling them middlemen, you're implying that publishers add no value to the end product. That's a misconception: an author writes a manuscript, a publisher makes it into a book. Often, it takes as much time and effort to turn a manuscript into a book as it took the author to write the manuscript. As more writers choose to self publish ebooks, it's becoming quite clear how crucial the role of a publisher is. Most of those self produced 'books' are completely unreadable. Charlie Stross explained it well: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h... Also, Amazon isn't taking publishers out of the equation. It's becoming one.
    - tjmc 15y ago
      Everyone who voted the parent comment down because it offended their groupthink should read the forwards of a few books. Authors constantly sing the praises of editors who helped them get their books into shape. Good producers do the same thing to music. This meme that there are no benefits to professional production is demonstrably stupid. If you're unable to leave it on Reddit or Slashdot where it belongs, at least have the courtesy not to mod down people who say otherwise.

Hitchhiker 15y ago

Marc's on the game http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...

ghurlman 15y ago

Barnes & Noble's has a publishing house of their own for a while; I'm surprised it's taken Amazon this long.

shadowsun7 15y ago
Amazon has been launching imprints for the last year or so, including romance imprint Montlake Romance, thriller imprint Thomas & Mercer, and most recently sci-fi imprint 47North. Nothing new here, this article has been a long time coming.

padobson 15y ago

Books are great - and certainly more cost effective for someone like Amazon to go straight to the content creators. I would like to see them do the same with music and video, but that costs a bit more to produce. There are a number of middlemen out there that need stronger competition from alternate sales channels. Big NY publishers are just a subset of incumbents holding on to a dying business model that need a good shot of disruption.

jwallaceparker 15y ago
They've started Amazon Studios which is already heading down the road of competing with other Hollywood production companies.
- michaelfeathers 15y ago
  At what point does this end up touching anti-trust?

ilamont 15y ago

I think publishers will still have a lot of strength in niche areas/specialization, areas in which Amazon can't effectively scale. That is, unless it starts recruiting editorial staff or begins partnering with smaller publishers in those areas.

wicknicks 15y ago

This had to happen sooner or later. I can't help but feel sad at how some content owners have been sticking to old school technology for decades without trying out new opportunities. Publishers will soon be replaced with such 'distributors' soon. Today its books, tomorrow someone will come along and do this to the music industry.

brady747 15y ago

My father (about 5+ years ago when itunes was picking up steam) thought Apple would sign Madonna and several other big artists and start producing music themselves. I guess he was just off by brand name and a good number of years ahead of the curve with the idea, but its exciting to see this change happening.

alanh 15y ago

Hello, obvious future!

FD3SA 15y ago

Why do I suddenly get the sense that no amount of stimulus funding is going to solve the structural unemployment issue in the USA? We appear to have crossed the technology Rubicon, whereupon the ratio of jobs created to jobs destroyed by technology becomes less than unity. The Luddite fallacy only holds true as long as the ratio is above or at unity. Interesting times.

TylerE 15y ago
That's been true for a looong time. Remember when offices had typing pools and messenger boys?
morrow 15y ago
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_... I agree that it won't be fixed by stimulus - but it's because I believe that the current system is undergoing a form of violent restructuring, where current institutions and platforms are fighting for their survival against a tidal shift that's moving from a society dominated by centralized, few, powerful institutions, to decentralized, numerous, systems and platforms of democratic organization. I think what makes technology an always doubted, yet positive, force is that the rate of change and the instability it causes makes short term guesses easier to make successfully than longer term ones. For example, at the birth of the cell-phone, it's easier to predict that this new tech will kill off the pay-phone industry than it is to predict the future coming of the iPhone, or app stores, or the market 3d cell-phone cameras. It's easier to look at the current landscape, and predict how this new tech will damage it, than it is to look at a blank slate, and predict what of an infinite number of possibilities will actually work in the newly created space.
- DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  It's also easy to step back until something good comes of it, focus on just the good, and ignore the bad. Take your cell phone example. Cell phones are allowing the government to track the location of all it's citizens. Without a warrant in some cases. If somebody would have predicted that back when cellphones were introduced, people would have laughed them out of town. It was a ludicrous and paranoid idea. Yet here we are. We sit around watching videos, liking Facebook comments, and checking in at various events, all while a critical part of our anonymity has been destroyed. I'm not saying it's all bad. I'm saying there is a mix. If you ask me, I'd rather not have cell phones and have a more private life. No amount of slick packaging and voice control interfaces is going to make up for what I've lost. But we don't have to choose, of course. We can have our cake and eat it too. What's happened is that technology is staying leaps and bounds ahead of politics. It's like we're having to re-engineer the social contract every couple of decades or so. And the yahoos we have in power around the world are much more interested in their petty political games than this seismic shift that's occurring under them (which, in all honesty, they probably don't understand and probably couldn't deal with anyway). So the system gets more and more out of whack. Just wanted to balance what you were saying. This isn't a story of technology always making things better even though we sometimes doubt. It's a story of technology making things more complicated and making the individual more powerful in some ways and that having effects that we poorly understand.

kanenathan213 15y ago

Finally. Now somebody just needs to do this for academic papers that taxpayers pay for and leech publishers profit from.

william42 15y ago
http://www.plos.org/ http://www.plos.org/

ck2 15y ago

Who is the --AA of the publishing industry, obviously they have far few legal protections for their schemes.

epo 15y ago

Amazon is an old-fashioned monopolist. When dealing with these beasts they are your friend until it is more profitable for them not to be. JK Rowling does not require Amazon but Amazon will never produce another JK Rowling because they will not do the marketing and groundwork necessary. Authors are investing in their future when choosing commercial partners. By partnering with Amazon they could be putting all their eggs in one basket, this is not necessarily a bad thing to do but it does require that you watch that basket very carefully.

dlss 15y ago
> implying JK Rowling was produced by a publisher Source? You don't think JK would have produced at the same quality with a different publisher? Or if she had borrowed money, paid her own editor, and self-published?
- epo 15y ago
  She was famously flat broke, I doubt she could have borrowed money or done any of the other things to get traction. What she got from her publisher was marketing, contacts, distribution of review copies ... (it certainly wasn't editing). Big famous authors are not going to go with Amazon, they can self publish (c.f. Zappa, Radiohead). Smaller authors are not going to get effort put into them and are better off buying lottery tickets than relying on Amazon for career development. The people do who do the work Amazon won't do? Publishers.
rmc 15y ago
Amazon will never produce another JK Rowling Yes they can. They don't need a widely popular children book about magic and wizards that gets lots of children excited. All they need are loads of books to sell that people want to buy. Will Amazon shut down their eBook business if JK Rowling doesn't sign up? No. That should tell you how much Amazon need JK Rowling.
- nobody314159 15y ago
  It's EASIER for Amazon produce a JK Rowling. You sign up 10-100-1000 childrens writers, it costs you almost nothing. Then if one of them starts to get any traction through reviews, blogs, slashdotting etc you can very quickly and easily promote the hell out of them by simply putting them on the front page of Amazon.com or pushing suggested books at your customers. Compare that to traditional publisher - it has to pick one author and spend a lot of time and money sending them on signing tours, book shop promotions, getting reviews in the NYT. So they have to spend 90% of it's money on the existing big names to be sure of a return.

sathishmanohar 15y ago

Next in the list is Music Labels. Go Digital Companies.

richardw 15y ago

I've always been amazed that all the publishers never got together and said "let's build our own web store". I understand that it's not simple, but the alternative is to have Amazon disintermediate you at some point.

eftpotrm 15y ago
Why did the record labels not put together a RIAA-controlled iTunes well before Apple did? Or the movie studios an MPAA download store before Netflix? One, they've got a lot invested in the current model, which is primarily priced around selling medium rather than content - http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html. Two, they've spent years learning to compete and regard their biggest threats as each other. They're not culturally equipped to work together to combat a transformational challenge.
- richardw 15y ago
  RIAA didn't want music delivered electronically, and iTunes got them over that hump. They could not have thought of that themselves. However, an online book store selling the same products you have for a hundred years is a much easier sell. You aren't harming your existing business, you're extending it from publishing to distribution and sales. That's just vertical integration - quite well-understood as a business technique. The tricky part is the touchy-feely web aspect (since that they understand publishing and are very close to distribution already). So given the amount of money they stand to lose, I have no doubt they could have made it work. Undercut the prices everyone else has to charge and you create a serious incentive for people to try you out, forgive your mistakes and give you 5 years to slowly figure out how to perfect the model.

acabal 15y ago

I've been reading about the imminent death of publishers for a while now, but I don't think they're ever going to disappear completely. And I run a site for writers that processes hundreds of manuscripts daily. People like to make the comparison of the inevitable democratization of books to how the internet changed the music industry, but that's just not an apt comparison. Books cannot be consumed in the same way as music. Pop songs are usually 2-3 minutes long, and an entire album clocks in at half an hour to an hour. Generally you can listen to a few songs from a band and make a decision as to whether you like their style and want to buy the album on the spot. Books aren't like that. A reader must often invest a significant amount of time--days--before it becomes clear that a book is or isn't good. Publishers provide the extremely valuable service of validation. If you get your book published up by Random House, then the reader at the store can say, if absolutely nothing else, that a group of well-read professionals thought your book was good enough to warrant stamping with their brand and spending money polishing and marketing. You just can't say that about 99% of self-published material, and when it can take days for a reader to determine quality, that distinction becomes important. And, despite what many would lead you to believe, publishers provide a valuable service besides validation. They take a raw manuscript and polish it up to professional standards. The manuscript is only part of the finished product that we call a book. You also need cover art, which is your book's first impression and incredibly important--not something you want to leave to your 18-year-old nephew with a cracked copy of Photoshop. You need typesetting, which is still important in the digital world: how many middle-aged writers know--or want to learn--HTML/CSS? You need editing. Having run a site for writers I can guarantee you that an author's perfect final manuscript is still filled with typos, mistakes, and ripe for polishing from a trained professional. You need marketing: the best book in the world won't get read if nobody knows it exists. The truth is that writers are good at writing, but often not that good at all of the other aspects of publishing a book. A big publisher takes that off their hands and handles it in a professional way. I suspect that the people who say publishers are dead have themselves never picked up a random indie author's book from Amazon. If they had, they'd realize that not every author is Amanda Hocking or Scott Sigler. In fact they'd probably realize that what they just read was filled with typos, had shitty cover art, maybe had greater structural problems like weak characterization, and likely was priced just about right at 99 cents. If anything, the death of publishers could be very dangerous, because when young new readers start getting burned by crappy self-published books, they'll get turned off to reading and we'll have lost yet another generation to TV and fast media.

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roqetman 15y ago

I wonder if there could be a model where an author releases a "beta" version of their book at a cheaper price and then "fixes" suggested by readers are then released for free to those who bought the original. A kind of group editing. A later version 1 could be released at a higher price for those who don't want to deal with errors.

tokenadult 15y ago
I wonder if there could be a model where an author releases a "beta" version of their book at a cheaper price and then "fixes" suggested by readers are then released for free to those who bought the original. A kind of group editing. These days, a lot of writers write alpha versions as blog posts. Commenters and other bloggers provide suggestions of fixes.

g2link 15y ago

This may be the final death knell for the publishing industry but it also indirectly provides a clear description of how Internet empowered businesses can be fatally disruptive. The quote that has to be burning holes in the stomachs of publishing pros everywhere comes from Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti: “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.” http://g2li.me/ppkHhM http://g2li.me/ppkHhM