The collective insanity of the publishing industry

http://genedoucette.me/2016/02/the-collective-madness-of-the-publishing-industry/

by suraj • 10 years ago

204 146 10 years ago

lenepp• 10 years ago

What a great piece. The point about how the big publishers have more control over printed books gets to the heart of the matter.

Pxtl• 10 years ago

I'm surprised Amazon hasnt gone into publishing. Get some big name authors on board, pick up some classics, etc. Do Netflix.

ghaff7• 10 years ago

They have dipped their toe in the water with Singles. In general I'd expect their approach might be to continue to expand their relationship with self-published authors who their data shows has promise. With big-name authors they're just on the same playing field as the other publishers.

dminor• 10 years ago

They have - aside from Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon has their own imprints that do traditional publishing. Many bookstores refuse to stock those books though.

kevinr18• 10 years ago

Amazon have a huge pile of different publishing imprints, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Publishing

And that's just original imprints; it doesn't list things like Audible, which Amazon owns, and which are THE major audiobook publisher, but almost always published secondary to a print publication rather than original.

And that's not including Amazon's multiple self-publishing options, including the Kindle Direct program.

Booktrope• 10 years ago

The comments to this post are really interesting - one comment claims that (according to an agent) agency pricing was Amazon's idea, not the big 5, even though, the big 5 very publicly insisted on agency pricing. It's really absurd. Of course, agency pricing for ebooks was first pushed by Apple, part of what got them and the big publishers in trouble for antitrust conspiracy (when the publishers agreed to withhold books from Amazon if Amazon kept discounting)

The the comments about Amazon and publishing, Amazon has a very major publishing operation (called, suprise!, Amazon Publishing). It's grabbing market share very quickly. If you want information about this check authorearnings.com (which provides industry sales estimates that include self-publishing) Of course the big story in the publishing business is that self-publishing is rapidly eclipsing traditional publishers in the ebook space.

Amazon is not only doing Netflix for books. It's doing Netflix for film and TV. The big competitor to Netflix is not any network or studio -- it's Amazon.

petra• 10 years ago

If the ebooks many want to read are expensive electronically, maybe many won't buy a kindle, but still buy the printed books ? And without a kindle, they won't buy cheaper books from the competition ?

And maybe this will slow Amazon's success for a few profitable years, more profitable than current loses ? And maybe by that time the publishers will find an ebook strategy that will work(hard to believe, but maybe).

Also,let's look on the other side - what happens if ebooks fully kill print ? can publishing even make money in such state of affairs ?

dcw303• 10 years ago

The sales that would go to that $15.99 book are going to lower-priced books from indie authors and self-published authors, like me.
They actually proved the consumer will buy the cheaper option, but okay

I find it alarming that an indie author does not seem to be concerned with cheap product flooding the market. Amazon's attempts to lower barriers to entry means more aspiring authors competing for a piece of the pie. Look at how the race to the bottom in the App Store is destroying indie iPhone developers.

kevingadd• 10 years ago

Aside from the obvious errors the publishers made, it's EXTREMELY SENSIBLE to see Amazon going 'we're going to sell your books at $10 but pay you like they were $16' and respond with 'what's the trick?'

Obviously, if you're doing something like that, there's some sort of upside for you. What's the upside? Is it... just speculating here... pushing literally every other serious bookseller out of the market by selling things at a loss, attaining near-monopoly status, and acquiring the ability to make publishers do whatever you want so you can crank your revenues up?

Of course, even if Amazon were doing something like that (how implausible! :-) ), the publishers weren't going to put a stop to it with the kind of antics they got up to...

There are already examples of how bad Amazon's pricing and fees are in areas where they have little competition - for example, the cost to deliver ebook downloads to users.

For example: In Japan, ebook download pricing is extremely low (in no small part due to manga). If it wasn't, nobody would sell their ebooks on amazon.co.jp, because they'd get utterly suffocated by the download fees. In every other country, the download fees are dramatically higher than those in japan. So much higher that it in fact drives independent authors to leave out illustrations and carefully optimize their PDF files to reduce costs.

You can see http://www.mhpbooks.com/what-does-it-cost-to-deliver-an-eboo... for an old article on the subject, but you can check the current rates and see that they haven't improved, and observe the very suspicious carve-out for japanese ebooks.

jpatokal• 10 years ago

Alarming, isn't it? I mean, imagine the chaos that would result if everybody was allowed to put up websites, publish whatever they wanted and charge what they wanted.

TheOtherHobbes• 10 years ago

The indie author isn't concerned, because indie authors get much more per Amazon sale than they do from a traditional publishing contract.

The flooding already happened. There was a gold rush a few years ago when anyone who had any interest in writing slapped together an ebook and put it online.

Some of those authors did incredibly well for a year or two, then the market became saturated.

So there was a shake out. Authors who understand business - marketing, leads, keeping a mailing list, and running a blog that provides value - are doing somewhere between "ok, I guess" and "still earning well."

The opportunists and not-so-greats and other amateurs have given up and run away.

Now, the market for indies is stronger than it was - because as the post says, trad pub has strangled its own market share. And this is excellent for indies.

x0x02• 10 years ago

I remain stunned the authors don't do mailing lists. There are a handful of authors that I will purchase everything they write. Until goodreads, there was no real way for them to notify me to buy something from them. And even now goodreads isn't particularly efficient about it.

I really think they would benefit from asking fans to sign up for an announcements list that is just announcements of new work. Plus it gives them the ability to sell smaller works published via kindle to their fans to pad out the gaps between full books.

exolymph2• 10 years ago

Also, if you can differentiate in a compelling way, you can charge more.

officialchicken• 10 years ago

Guess who saw an uptick in print sales in 2015?

Textbooks.

chrisseaton2• 10 years ago

Often, the prices were higher than the price of the print edition, which is just fundamentally insane.

Why is this insane? An ebook has more value to me than the print one as it's more convenient. Since it has more value to me I'm prepared to pay more.

The physical copy could be free and I'd still pay to get the ebook instead in most cases.

kevinr18• 10 years ago

Also that's often comparing the discounted price of a print edition to the full price of the ebook. Print books being still sold under the old wholesale model, Amazon can still discount them, whereas ebooks being sold under the new model, Amazon can't discount them.

GabrielF002• 10 years ago

When I'm looking at prices at an online bookstore, I don't care what the list price is, I care what the price I have to pay is.

When a physical object that has to be manufactured and shipped costs more than a text file, I feel ripped off. Especially since I can lend a physical book to someone or sell it to a local used book store, neither of which I can do with an ebook.

kevinr18• 10 years ago

I have a small pile of friends in publishing, so I'll take this from the other side. The reasons for the publishers' apparent insanity are:

* Contrary to popular belief, physical production is NOT the single largest part of a book's cost. In fact, even before ebooks, the cost of paper and ink and shipping was actually a pretty negligible part of the final cost.

Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me.

Salaries in publishing have for decades been nosing around the minimum the market will bear---as just one example, freelance proofreaders get paid a penny per word; the good ones get two. Many freelance proofreaders are also editors, copyeditors, and authors in their own right, and hustle their asses off to make incomes that, coming from tech, we wouldn't consider starvation wages.

* Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not.

pgrote• 10 years ago

"* Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not."

I think this is the number one reason. The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value.

I buy a fair number of non-fiction books and loved when ebooks emerged as a viable way to buy a book at what I perceived to be a reasonable price. Now that the agency model has been in force I've just shifted how I buy ... I buy used books from Amazon.

All the books I used to buy as ebooks the publisher was receiving revenue. Now, they don't receive any money from my purchases.

The book publishing industry still has a window of opportunity to transition to ebooks under their own direction, but it's almost closed. See the recording industry.

kevinr18• 10 years ago

The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value.

How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance?

This is a serious question: just a few days ago I was suggesting that a friend, twenty published books over the last thirty years, books you may have read or heard of, start a Patreon so that he might, for the first time in his life, afford health insurance.

People working full-time in publishing might have health insurance but are working for well below market (by outside of tech standards, which are pretty embarrassing) in some of the most expensive cities on earth. And they can't just move, because then they'd get converted to contract and lose their health insurance.

This is not to shame you for buying used books---that's fine, there's no way I'd have the library I do without them, and I grew up groveling the library and used bookstores because that was all we could afford. Readers are readers. But---and I encounter this again and again---readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.

true_religion• 10 years ago

Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me.

The costs of modern day e-books are real, but for many genres markets its possible that buyers are simply willing to tolerate a book that's objectively worse (more errors, worse design, illustration by total unknowns, fonts free sources instead of foundries).

Rather than continuing to participate in the traditional industry, I think a lot of authors will have to self-publish and realize that if they can't give their book the love needed to not "make your eyes bleed" then their work will fail in the marketplace. They can't rely on someone else to take a manuscript and clean it up to a publishable version anymore.

There's just not space for those middlemen and helpers in a lot of genres market, unless you are a best seller.

ghaff7• 10 years ago

They probably need at least a copy editor. (Typos are really annoying and you just can't deal with those without help.) But, yeah,for some genres, people with at least a niche following may do better with cutting out a lot of expensive "middlemen" who provide incremental improvement.

kevinr18• 10 years ago

Actually, most of my experience is from the science fiction/fantasy genre. Genre buyers are willing to tolerate sub-par production---and let's be honest, the pulp paperbacks of yesteryear were not exactly going to give Edward Tufte a designgasm, so this isn't a new trend, just an old trend which has found new life in a new medium.

That said, the market for freelance book production people is actually much better than it was a few years ago, for precisely the reason that there's just more money in the market now.

tzs• 10 years ago

Contrary to popular belief, physical production is NOT the single largest part of a book's cost. In fact, even before ebooks, the cost of paper and ink and shipping was actually a pretty negligible part of the final cost.

Yup. For a typical hardback, the physical costs (printing, shipping, and storing) are about $3.25. Here's an article from a few years ago that looked at the money side of paper books and ebooks: [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.ht...

philfrasty• 10 years ago

Given that you print a vast amount of copies and it is all black-and-white on thin paper. Go color (e.g. cookbooks) with 200g+ paper and you can easily double or triple that price.

revelation• 10 years ago

That's a massive massive part of a $15 book, then? That's about the same proportion as the parts cost for a typical electronics product.

x0x02• 10 years ago

And, having witnessed what happened to the music industry, the publishers are uneager to let amazon itunes them.

StefanKarpinski• 10 years ago

Legitimate question: what is the total cost of labor to publish a book, aside from writing it and physical production? It's hard to imagine it being more than $25k – a quarter-person's salary at $100k/year for editing, typesetting and design. At $5 per book, that's covered by 5000 sales. With ebooks, the rest is pure profit – or could go directly to the author if authors hired publishers to do that work instead of the other way around. The push to revive print books seems like a last ditch effort to preserve a model where the publishers are essential and therefore in control instead of the authors running the show.

akie• 10 years ago

I'm involved in an open access book publisher that will publish their first (academic) books this summer. Everything digital & print on demand, and the reviewing and copy editing is mostly done for free by other academics. Professional typesetting though, and I do think they pay someone for helping with editing. All in all, this brings us to a cost of €3000 to €5000 per book.

grey-area2• 10 years ago

This might be a little out of date, but the breakdown is something like 40% retailer, 10% distribution, 10% print, 5-10% author, 10% editorial, 20% profit. On future print runs the publisher gets more profit of course. NB the retailer takes most of the profit. For ebooks the situation is worse in that Amazon takes 70% unless you choose to sell exclusively, but at least canny authors can bypass the publisher. You can see then why publishers are hostile to ebooks, for them it is an even worse deal and they lose control to a predatory retailer (Amazon).

5000 sales is larger than most first print runs, a minority of books are bestsellers and sell hundreds of thousands, the majority sell just a few thousand and make very little profit if anything, this is why publishers offer an advance set against future royalties.

There is still a vestigial authority to a printed book (someone other than the author liked this) and a stigma attached to self publishing, so there is some value still to being published on paper, because the main benefit to most authors is reputational, not monetary. It will be interesting to see if that changes with ebooks. However, like print newspapers, mass-market print books are dead, they were always on thin margins but are now unsustainable. This will take a decade or two to work out, but it will happen.

kevinr18• 10 years ago

This is weird because there's great variety between books and publishers, and there are lots of hidden costs. The one most self-publishers miss is marketing and sales---at the big publishers, there are

I am not a publishing industry insider, so these numbers are an educated SWAG, but let's see if they shed any light.

Let's say a top editor at a big-5 genre publisher makes $100k a year. That's way high, but we'll roll with it, 'cuz it makes the math work out nicely. Let's say they work on ten books a year, also probably high, but that's $10k/book. If they make $50k and work on five books a year that's still the right ballpark.

The art and production departments are shared across a publisher's whole line, or possibly even multiple imprints. Let's say the department costs $300k total and does thirty books a year, for $10k/book, which includes the cost of soliciting and paying the artist for the cover art, ebook and physical production, copyediting and proofreading.

We're up to $20k now.

Now we get to the fun part. Your big-5 publisher literally pays people to go read your book and then drive to all the bookstores in a geographic area and convince them to buy it. Figure that there are 10 of them in the US, each of them pulls in $50k, and they're repping 25 books a quarter, so 100 a year. That's another $5k on top just for their salaries, not counting their travel and expenses, for which $15k a person a year seems not unreasonable. And this isn't counting ad buys or any marketing, just plain sales. So figure half your book's total budget is sales.

So that's $40k/book for a midlist, 100k-word genre title from a well-regarded editor before we get to the author or the physical production.

(Things I'm leaving out: legal department, some kind of business/management structure, some kind of web site???)

Professional rates in fiction are a princely seven cents a word, so for an author who's worked a year on a book (not unreasonable) that's a whole $7k---but this book was acquired by a well-regarded editor at a good house, so let's say the author is getting a whole twenty cents a word, or $20k, for this year of labor. That's a third of the cost of the book so far. Accounting around authors in publishing gets weird---advances versus residuals, etc.; actually accounting in publishing is just plain weird, period---and a $20k advance is princely, but not unreasonably so.

So then the publisher has spent $60k on your book, and wants to earn its money back and then some.

My sense is that 5k sales is a low number, and certainly you aren't going to get a $20k advance next time, if your next book gets picked up at all. Publishing is a hits business---most sales happen in the first few months---so rates matter more than absolute numbers. 5k sales over ten years might finally earn out your advance, but 5k sales in the first month will get the second book of your trilogy picked up. 100k sales is John Scalzi territory, and my sense is that 30k sales is comfortable midlist territory.

Now, 30k sales on $60k spent out of the gate works out to $2/book, or $8/book profit at $10/book ($13 list with an Amazon/wholesale cut of 30%), but remember that in a hits business not nearly every book will sell even that many copies, but no one can predict ahead of time which ones, so publishers need to invest in many more books which won't sell to find the ones that will. It's anecdotally reported in the publishing industry---and I think it's evident in the financials as well---that breakout, millions-of-copies-sold success 50 Shades of Gray subsidized essentially all of Random House's other books for a year or two.

It depends on your hits business how bad the ratio is, but in genre publishing figure that less than half of books earn out for the author, so at $60k/book that's 6k sales minimum, which not every book makes. (Classic scenario: publisher gives you a big advance on your outline but then decides not to sell or market the book when you turn it in and they don't like it, but they don't want to pay the kill fee, so they rush it through production, ignore it in marketing, print the minimum required copies, and hope nobody buys them. Whoops.)

The key expense self-publishing discussions usually miss is really the sales and marketing one, followed closely by editorial. And freelance editors do exist and are quite good, so if you're self-publishing, consider one. I don't know of any freelance book salespeople, though. For some reason salespeople are very good about getting paid.

I should add that this is not to say that, if you're self-publishing, you should expect to spend $60k on your book. My sense is that even $10k/book is on the high side. Certainly out here in the freelance world I would tell an author expecting to put that much up to self-publish her book that she was being taken for a ride, and not the fun kind.

Remember that you're giving up sales and marketing, and you're not paying yourself an advance, so you're down to $20k already, and then you're working with newer artists and freelance professionals. Depending on how good you are at the various aspects of the work (and don't kid yourself here, he says mostly to himself), figure $3-5k is a decent ballpark for an anthology or a full-length novel. It's not going to sell 6k copies either, but then paying more probably wouldn't help its sales any. Still, do your research, don't shortchange your business partners, pay for quality where it counts, and don't pay for vanity publishers (Author Solutions, etc.)

avn2109• 10 years ago

> "Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting"

I must confess to being baffled by all this talk of typesetting, for the following reasons:

1) My ebook readers (Calibre and iBooks, mostly) algorithmically render and reflow the text to arbitrary typefaces, sizes, columnar layouts, etc. Isn't this "typesetting?" And isn't it taking place entirely in software? [0]

2) Latex consumes a plain-text (aka neither designed nor typeset) file as input and produces tolerably-good machine typeset output. Its output is vastly better than plenty of well-regarded periodicals such as [1], which proves by construction that good-enough machine typesetting can be implemented.

[0] I'm not claiming iBooks typesetting is remotely comparable to what's found in a Random House hardcover, but rather that no hand typesetting at all takes place for most (all?) ebooks.

[1] http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/

dietrichepp• 10 years ago

LaTeX can only do typesetting when a human operator makes it happen. Human operators for LaTeX tend to be fairly expensive, I dare you to try and hire one.

kevinr18• 10 years ago

Your ebook readers get a lot of hints from the ebook file about how to present the material---I am light on details, but I believe them to be significant. It's true that there's no human there checking the typeblocks for rivers and orphans, but I can tell the difference between an ebook file produced by Calibre and one which a human has had a hand in, I happily pay my $13 for the latter, and woe betide the publisher when I discover that I paid $13 for an automated conversion. (The most egregious was a math book which OCR'd the formulas---from a book which was evidently set for print in LaTeX.)

When I'm translating plain text (Markdown-ish) input to LaTeX, I spend a bit of time going through by hand making sure all my formatting has converted correctly, any accents or non-roman characters are correct, the single- and double-quotes are correct, I haven't accidentally copy-pasted any ligatures, I have included hyphenation for nonstandard words, I've included any relevant non-breaking spaces, figures and headings and captions are flowing correctly, etc. etc. And all of these are still necessary when producing an ebook.

It's maddeningly detail-oriented, but the results are really noticeably much better, and in many cases make the difference between the text being readable and not. It's a bit like the cue dots at the movie theater---if you're not looking for them, you don't notice your uninterrupted experience unless the projectionist screws something up.

kriro• 10 years ago

My counterpoint would be that marketing and selling are often done rather wrong by the big publishing houses. People care about the story behind the book and the authors, I rarely see these emphasized in the typical publisher campaigns. Much easier for a modern author to forge these relationships naturally. The other things you mentioned can also be automated to some extend (typesetting and layout for sure).

joshvm• 10 years ago

You might be interested in this Japenese bookshop - it was on HN a while ago. The proprietor only stocks one title at a time and treats the shop more like an exhibition.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/23/japanese-booksh...

muddi900• 10 years ago

The publishing industry did this before by colluding with Apple. Had to settle out of court with DoJ over it.

jay_kyburz2• 10 years ago

I'm often laughed at when I suggest it, but I think the publishing world needs to look at what's happening with free to play games.

You remove the barrier to entry so that as many people as possible will try your product (free).

You identify those people who really enjoy your book and want to consume more of the same.

You provide them with so much content that they can spend as must as they like.

It's not unreasonable for people to spend 100's of dollars a month enjoying their favorite pastimes.

Why put a $15 cap on it per book.

yolesaber• 10 years ago

Congratulations, you invented the magazine.

jay_kyburz2• 10 years ago

I see you are not familiar with free to play games, or magazines, or both.

toyg9• 10 years ago

The problem is that content generation for books is extremely expensive and non-repeatable. What are you going to sell, the same word over and over? Illustrations (which are expensive themselves)?

lmm10• 10 years ago

At the high level, sell commissioned side-stories for the super-fans. Below that, special limited editions, expensive bonus features, alternate endings, merchandise.

kevinr18• 10 years ago

Folks are experimenting with models like this around Kickstarter, Patreon, Serial Box, etc.

The jury's still out on how successful it will be, for what kinds of projects, but I think it's clear that the world in which $15 retail packages are the only form factor prose fiction is ever sold in is basically gone, and that's probably for the better.

My favorite early example of this was Shadow Unit (http://shadowunit.org/), an entirely donation-supported serial.

deegles• 10 years ago

If Amazon really wanted to twist the knife, they would look into making the first-sale doctrine apply to ebooks. They might have to limit it to Kindle-to-Kindle sales at first, but Amazon would be able to take a cut of every book transfer in perpetuity.

My guess is that it would drive authors into services like Kindle Unlimited, since they would be able to create a long-term income stream unlike physical books or non-transferrable ebooks.

kitsune_• 10 years ago

Hachette isn't stupid. Amazon has a publishing arm, and of course, more importantly, has the Kindle. By lowering the prices Amazon gets people to buy into their eco-system . As a publisher you don't want a single distrubutor controlling your market.

coldtea5• 10 years ago

That sounds thoroughly reasonable, and it sort of is, but please let me explain because the crazy is in the details. What was happening was that Amazon was discounting the price of the ebooks, and it may seem like this is something the Big 5 would want to stop, except the markdown was coming off of Amazon’s end. In other words, if Hachette wanted to charge $15.99 for an ebook, and Amazon marked it down to $9.99, Hachette was still paid their cut of the full price of the book. More people will buy a book at $9.99 than at $15.99, so essentially, the Big 5 was coming out ahead in this arrangement in every conceivable way. They collected royalties at an unreasonably high price point while moving the number of units that corresponded to a lower price point.

Sounds good, unless you factor in other Hachette customers that get the shaft, because a company with deep pockets like Amazon uses their cash reserves to undercut them with unhealthy margins (actually negative margins).

This is downright monopoly behavior. Why should they accept it?

And of course those other outlets will complain to Hachette or ask for the same prices.

It's also a good way to screw the customers in the long run, as they get their cheap books from Amazon first, and then when the other stores with lesser means have died (unable to keep up with the negative margins), they can jack the prices again...

AlgorithmicTime• 10 years ago

Everyone keeps saying that Amazon has a secret evil plan to become THE source for everything and then jack up the prices, but no actual evidence of this ever happening.

coldtea5• 10 years ago

"Secret evil plan"? That's the very open and natural thing for any monopoly to do. It has been done by monopolies time and again.

Amazon just haven't reached that status in most areas yet.

And where it has, e.g. books, it already used its power to manipulate producers and the market in its favor. Siphoning millions for selling books below what you pay for them is not some kind of marketing trick, it's anti-competitive behavior meant to kill less loaded rivals...

kolinko• 10 years ago

It's not a secret evil plan. It's quite obvious, and such techiques are well known (and forbidden actually).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

amelius• 10 years ago

It seems that all creative/intellectual industries are caught in some sort of race to the bottom (e.g., software, publishing, music).

This is sad.

hrnnnnnn• 10 years ago

I think it's the same reason salaries are low in the games industry: everyone would rather have an interesting job in a creative industry for less money than a boring job at a bank for lots of money.

pja• 10 years ago

Anybody with the slightest interest in this topic should read Charlie Stross’ (cstross on HN) series of essays on the publishing industry: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

facepalm• 10 years ago

I can see the rationale of the publishers - they don't want Amazon to become a monopoly. Their counter-strategy will fail, but that is besides the point.

What is really puzzling is the many authors who thought the publishers are fighting for them and stated public support for their publishers. Especially since the publishers blockade apparently cost them a lot of sales.

Grue3• 10 years ago

So apparently the publishers trying to prevent a monopoly-grabbing maneuver from Amazon is insane. On the contrary, it would be insane if they let Amazon drive all other booksellers out of business and ruin the market.

jameshart• 10 years ago

The behavior does look irrational if you ignore the fact that publishers also want to sell their books in to other retailers and those retailers will not order books if they believe Amazon will deeply undercut them for the same titles. So they ask the publisher to put in place a deal with all the retailers through which the book will be sold that guarantees no one retailer will offer the book below a certain price. This is, of course, quite a lot like price fixing, but seems to be how it's been done in many areas of retail for just about ever.

The collective insanity of the publishing industry

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