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i believe the parent's post is (successfully) making a counter argument that though a publisher may have an incentive to minimize risk, primarily they are deeme

by tdonia 17y ago

i believe the parent's post is (successfully) making a counter argument that though a publisher may have an incentive to minimize risk, primarily they are deemed a 'publisher' because they publish (that is, broker the distribution of) books. approached from this perspective, it's hard to see this blog post's defense of publishers as simply minimizing their risk exposure as anything but shallow and counter intuitive to their primary goal of distributing books. that said, i don't work in publishing - i only consume it's published products - so i reserve the right to be wrong about how they make their money. i speculate here solely on the assumption that most business still does require someone to consume a product in exchange for a currency commensurate to an agreed value.

andreyf 17y ago
Ah, then I should have made the distinction between "publishers" and "copyright owners", please do a mental: s/publishers/copyright owners/g Publishers have nothing to do with negotiating copyrights with Amazon, unless they are also the copyright owners, and copyright owners don't give a shit how their books are consumed, as long as they keep getting paid.
- tdonia 17y ago
  that doesn't change the original replies basic point: without consumers, neither the copyright holder nor the publisher nor amazon makes any money. and pretty much everyone on the planet that's not a publisher/copyright owner/bookseller really doesn't care in the slightest about the perspectives of their business. sorry, but we never will. when you're selling something as abstract as a story you should consider yourself lucky that ANYONE is willing to devote any portion of their non-survival budget to such trivialities. While it's become common lately for people to be able to do so, this is a very new (less than 2 centuries) old phenomenon that's still quite fragile. And as the music industry has so effectively proven - if you push consumers hard enough they're not going to give up on their content, rather, they'll route around the choke point and take over distribution (and by extension content production) through less centralized means. this, in my mind, is a much greater risk facing the publishing/copyright holder industries than simple ebook platforms.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    without consumers, neither the copyright holder nor the publisher nor amazon makes any money And that doesn't change my point: most customers don't care. If customers cared, DRM would be a business risk, and acted on accordingly. But they don't, and so it's not. I wish customers cared. I really do. I wish they cared about their shoes being made by little slave children and civilian Iraqi deaths, too. But they don't. Now, we can make ourselves feel better by sitting here and bitching about it, or we can understand the world and try to make it better in whatever little way we can.

by tdonia 17y ago

andreyf 17y ago

Ah, then I should have made the distinction between "publishers" and "copyright owners", please do a mental: s/publishers/copyright owners/g Publishers have nothing to do with negotiating copyrights with Amazon, unless they are also the copyright owners, and copyright owners don't give a shit how their books are consumed, as long as they keep getting paid.

tdonia 17y ago
that doesn't change the original replies basic point: without consumers, neither the copyright holder nor the publisher nor amazon makes any money. and pretty much everyone on the planet that's not a publisher/copyright owner/bookseller really doesn't care in the slightest about the perspectives of their business. sorry, but we never will. when you're selling something as abstract as a story you should consider yourself lucky that ANYONE is willing to devote any portion of their non-survival budget to such trivialities. While it's become common lately for people to be able to do so, this is a very new (less than 2 centuries) old phenomenon that's still quite fragile. And as the music industry has so effectively proven - if you push consumers hard enough they're not going to give up on their content, rather, they'll route around the choke point and take over distribution (and by extension content production) through less centralized means. this, in my mind, is a much greater risk facing the publishing/copyright holder industries than simple ebook platforms.
- andreyf 17y ago
  without consumers, neither the copyright holder nor the publisher nor amazon makes any money And that doesn't change my point: most customers don't care. If customers cared, DRM would be a business risk, and acted on accordingly. But they don't, and so it's not. I wish customers cared. I really do. I wish they cared about their shoes being made by little slave children and civilian Iraqi deaths, too. But they don't. Now, we can make ourselves feel better by sitting here and bitching about it, or we can understand the world and try to make it better in whatever little way we can.