Here 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
IMO, 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.
As a self publisher who’s used Kickstarter for 4 books now, let me say: the creative side of writing the books, doing the layout, getting it print ready, coordinating with artists etc is a beast.
Then when you add on the publisher side of distribution, fulfillment, lost orders, customer service, marketing etc you have a whole other beast.
It’s manageable in the right circumstances, and pieces can be sort of automated or out sourced, but (at least for me) the other grinds begin to absolutely kill my ability to do the creative work. And meanwhile fans are like “omg when’s the next book coming out?!?!?”
That’s said, I think the publishing “industry” needs to be ripped down and overhauled, but the work a publisher needs to do is very valuable and different than the creative needs.
It seems like a creator or their commissioned agent coordinating a disintermediated "supply chain" of service providers, with the creator retaining ownership of the intellectual property rights, could be a viable and lower-overhead alternative.
That exists in the form of "vanity" publishers and "hybrid" publishers, which tend to rip off their clients, instead of providing actual value.
In addition, people tend to vastly underestimate the difficulty of building a successful marketing campaign to actually sell books, in addition to the extreme difficulty of actually building relationships with distributors. Successfully selling a book is not that different than running a business. There's a lot more you need than just coordinating a "supply chain."
I feel like there are a lot of "experts" on publishing in this discussion, but few actual publishers who know the reality of the business.
I wonder how many times a book will not sell without a marketing campaign simply because it is not good. It seems to me that in a world of electronic communication & social media, it should be possible for a good book to become widely known & demanded by simply being good & the news about it spreading.
Individual book sellers still could do some marketing simply to increase sales once such a good book shows up.
Extremely frequently - I love to bash marketing at every given opportunity but books are tough - if I hand you a book you have no way to do a surface evaluation without leaning on associated knowledge - is it by an author you know - is it part of a series you like[1]. If not, then you've got the dust cover summary to go on and those will often be overwhelmingly positive even if it isn't warranted.
A friend of mine is an independent author who self-markets their books and they've learned over years where money will pay itself back and where you're throwing it into a hole - but not investing in promotion at all just means you'll be relegated to obscurity.
When I'm shopping for a broom I have some expectations - I've really grown to appreciate the rubber headed brooms over bristly ones and I am pretty tall so length is a decent consideration... When I'm shopping for a book, what do I have to go on? Cover art and the summary, probably... and those are hardly helpful.
1. Specifically I'm thinking of multi-author series like SW:EU or Dragonlance.
I'm ignorant about the way the industry works, for sure.
I'd love to know how much of the publishing and book-selling industries are coasting on inertia of "we've always done it this way", or the fear of "we've never done it this way".
It seems like electronic distribution should have massive ramifications for the business model. Does the publisher/distributor/retailer model really still need to exist in an electronic distribution world? I don't know enough about the value, beyond purchase aggregation, that distributors in that market actually provide.
What you see as "building relationships" sounds, to me, like needless middlemen exacting a tax on commerce.
Many businesses are little more than expertly coordinating a supply chain. That's a competency that offers a competitive advantage. Why is this business so different?
If all book sales were electronic, that might indeed invite a reassessment of publishers' value in securing distribution. But ebooks are only about 20% of book sales (and that figure is not rising).
It 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.
The difference is that publishers have professional editors that ensure a minimum level of quality.
Kickstarter is more about how good your pitch is.
In fact quality control is, I think, where publishers bring the most value today. Both in science and in the general case. Maybe the only one in the digital era.
This exists in the UK, it's called Unbound. They've been around for ten years and they've done... fine. Some decent books. But their business model has not exactly conquered the world. As an author myself, I would never consider defecting from my "legacy" publisher to a service like that, because my publisher has been extremely valuable to me.
The percentages aren't particularly relevant to me, because I live off advances, not royalties. Sales are still meaningful, because they help determine what advance I get next time, but in my case the idea that I'm getting a cut of each one is basically just symbolic – I've already been paid. Just one of many reasons I could never have had the same career without my "legacy" publisher.
(I should note that your percentages are way off, by the way – in the US I "get" 25% of the cover price for digital and between 7.5% and 25% for physical depending on the edition.)
What do you think will drive the market towards that? In my city our bookstores are closing. Many individuals use tablet electronic-readers. Will it be the electronic books, or the demise of bookstores that drives a publishing industry revolution?
It 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.
And 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.
As 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.
There 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.
It'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.
> 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!
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.
>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.
I'd be very afraid that "new business model" is that you have to watch an ad every 10 pages or books are only available through a subscription model of some sort--and they're only available through a SaaS.
I don't like that future either, but it sure seems like a lot of people do. It disturbs the heck out of me, but I have to consider that perhaps I'm just an out-of-touch oldster, too.
I'll keep buying physical articles as long as I can-- books, optical discs, etc. I'll reward creators who continue to make their works available that way. I'll buy a ticket when an author comes thru on a lecture tour. I'll attend a live concert and buy a shirt. (Admittedly, our current pandemic situation makes some of that difficult, but I do think it'll eventually pass, or we'll come up with new ways to do those things.) I've been reticent to enter into the patronage ecosystem (primarily because I'm concerned about the cut the middlemen take and the value they actually provide, as well as what the user experience is like) but I'm leaning more toward doing some of that too.
> 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.
As 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.
They 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.
> 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.
If you have a successful bed making business, and I decide to start making beds too, you'll certainly make less profit, but I haven't stolen from you. Deprivation of income is not theft, practically any action you take deprives someone of income.
Most justifications for property (both personal property and real estate) invoke the fact that pieces of property are rivalrous (one person's use interferes with another's). Calling unlicensed copying "stealing" ignores the crucial difference between physical goods and digital files.
Each 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.
I will agree that the writing is not stolen when you give every line of code produced by you or that you will produce in the future or any code produced by any company you have ever been part of or invested in to me for free to use as I wish.
Until then if you want to read an authors work then you need to pay their (usually very small) fee.
If someone pirates my code that's not stealing, that's copyright infringement.
I would love to live in a society that would recognize the post-scarcity nature of many goods nowadays and de-commodifies them, including computer programs, basic food, and in certain cases housing.
There will be no more "scarcity" when the "value" of the time required to produce these works reaches "zero." Until then, there will be plenty of scarcity.
By the way, I think we would all need "immortality" in order to reach that point.
Well, no. That is not what scarcity means. If we had an economy where you could replicate cars, food, houses, spaceships and so on for free, that would be post-scarcity, even though it takes some work for it to be engineered at the beginning.
Bits on a computer that can be reproduced forever are not scarce.
Ideas have a marginal cost of zero. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to monetize them on a per-unit basis. In that sense, copies of ideas are not scarce.
A car is not just an object, a car is also an idea. It's a design, the engineering of its parts, the implementation of its constructions, the code needed to make it work, and so on. And yet if we could replicate it for free, achieving a marginal labour cost of zero, then it would not be scarce anymore.
The implication of what you're saying is silly. Yes, making a marginal copy of the latest Star Wars film is nearly zero. However, the first instance cost $275,000,000 to create. We split the cost across each unit because if we didn't, the movie wouldn't exist, because nobody would buy the first unit.
You are getting too caught up on the fact that some things have low marginal costs to produce that you're entirely neglecting that overhead costs are a thing that also exist.
Even for something like Linux, there are gigantic overhead costs. The vast majority of Linux commits are made by people sitting at their paid job. Those lines of code are not free, they are financed by the companies who are willing to pay Intel/IBM/RedHat etc for their products and services.
Me too. I would love to be able to make anything I write free while having all my material needs seen to and only writing for the love of it/prestige.
But we don't live in that society.
I guess we could argue about semantics but depriving me of my ability to legitimately profit from my work while the IA wrapped itself in a flag of doing good seems like at the very least a very low form of behaviour, as well as illegal.
And I doubt many people would describe us any word other than theft.
Sure, but as it's going to only way for this to happen, and it certainly is possible, is if people start acting against large actors that have a vested interested against this in ways that make de-commodification necessary for the existence of the industry.
It is theft in the same way that someone squatting unused land in the north of Canada and being granted ownership is theft. The fact that we live in a system where this might cause loss of income for someone is neither necessary nor the moral responsibility of the Internet Archive, SciHub or Library Genesis.
They provide fewer and fewer valuable services as the marginal cost of content distribution approaches zero and they just seem more like rent seekers.