sigh.
On Amazon vs. MacmillanFrom my perspective, Macmillan (or any other publisher) is free to price their books however they like. I am free not to purchase them if I think the prices are too high -- or to wait for paperback or used-book or library versions. E-books are somewhat of a different story on that last score, because I'm not aware of an
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Regardless of rights to carry or not, based on my ten years in the book trade and the focus I've had on tech matters since, I suspect there will soon come a time when publishers think they were insanely fortunate that Amazon was able to charge AS MUCH AS ten dollars for an ebook.
The publishers are making the same mistake the music labels did when they moved to CDs. Rather than charge a lower price, reflecting the reduced cost of creating CDs compared to vinyl records, they jacked up prices. Back then, of course, consumers didn't have an alternative, so they had to eat the difference. But once Napster came on the scene, the labels discovered a widespread loathing for them among consumers that they have never been able to alleviate.
Publishers run the risk of earning the same disdain. There is no brand-loyalty among consumers for publishers to begin with, and I suspect most readers (particularly younger ones) are aware that more and more manuscripts are arriving at publishers every year already in some kind of electronic format. Now, of course, editing still needs to be done to work that initial file(s) into a 'publishable' form, but the costs involved, over the long run, are going to be less than what they were when moving dead trees around was the only way to go. Which means, in the long run, the price of ebooks had better be less than they were for printed books. Consumers are not going to accept any arguments from publishers to the contrary.
As for DRM, that's fail from the start, as Cory Doctorow has been arguing all along. One can argue different strategies for how to handle DRM-free distribution, depending on whether an author is starting out or well-established, but DRM has only created larger markets for pirated copies in the past, and the publishers are fools if they think the rules will be different for something as easy to copy as electronic text. Better to accept piracy as a reality of a certain (small) segment of the marketplace and work instead at finding prices the majority of consumers will accept.
If the resulting prices can't sustain publishing houses as we know them today, then existing publishing houses will be replaced by new ones that can. Having known and worked with many of the wonderful people who work in the book trade, I hate the idea of many of them suffering through a painful industry transition, but capitalism is the way it is. If we refuse as a culture to do much to help ordinary workers in times like this, then I see no reason to do any favors for their managers and presidents, much less the media conglomerates that own the major houses now.
If ten dollar ebooks won't make shareholders and Wall Street happy, then too bad for them. Personally, I think the book trade would be much better off if it returned to the relatively smaller scale it operated on back in the 70s.
Ok. Feeling less grumpy now.
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Charlie Stross's take on the situation, plus information on the supply-demand chain in ebook publishing.
I'd like to see the incremental-price model, myself. For books I really want, by authors I really like, I currently pay the higher hardback prices instead of waiting for the extra six months to a year for the paperback.
What those incremental prices should be is another question altogether, as you've identified above.
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What he's saying there sounds right to me. I would add that a certain bricks and mortar book retailer tried to pull the same wholesaler/retailer trick back in the 90s, so Amazon isn't the first one to try it.
As for who's the bad guy in this, I couldn't care less. I'm on the side of the authors only. Whoever is making them happy gets my vote. Everyone else is pretty much expendable.
(Again, I'm not happy about the good people--including sales people, who are unique from their peers in other industries by often being wonderful and not soulless--this would leave out in the cold, but the genie's out of the bottle now.)
As for the editors, the smart ones will start putting up their shingles as freelance consultants for authors and build their own brand names, either as individuals or as small teams, without the overhead or the management teams today's book trade sustains. I suspect twenty years from now, this is what people will mean when they talk about 'publishing houses.'
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