Also, that was a lot of words with basically no content:
"We publish books. We think books are special. We have not yet reached
an agreement with Amazon to keep selling books to them, but we will
eventually.
Also, we think this is all Amazon's fault and we're not going to consider their
proposal to pay our authors in the meantime until after we resolve the
contract dispute."
It was pure evil genius for Amazon to offer a pool of funds to compensate authors, split 50-50 with Hachette.
We’ve offered to Hachette to fund 50% of an author pool – to be
allocated by Hachette – to mitigate the impact of this dispute
on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%.
Hachette's response isn't nearly so clever.
Once we have reached such an agreement, we will be happy to
discuss with Amazon its ideas about compensating authors for
the damage its demand for improved terms may have done them,
and to pass along any payments it considers appropriate.
It really feels like Amazon is the bad guy in this situation though. They've demanded terms from Hachette, then lashed out by slowing, then ceasing entirely, sales of Hachette's books. That doesn't seem like a mature way of dealing with things (at least, not without a little more communication rather than just cutting them off unannounced).
Hachette's response makes sense. 'We didn't agree to the terms you tried to dictate to us, and now you're saying it's half our fault that these authors lost revenues as a result of your retaliation?'
> It really feels like Amazon is the bad guy in this situation though. They've demanded terms from Hachette, then lashed out by slowing, then ceasing entirely, sales of Hachette's books
Aren't they doing a standard renegotiation of their contract? If they don't have a contract, Amazon is under no obligation to sell Hachette's products at all. Meanwhile, I wasn't in the room for their contract negotiation, but who's to say that Hachette isn't the one making unreasonable demands?
It is kind of amusing how similar this is to the network neutrality debate -- i.e. comcast's dispute with netflix affecting comcast/netflix customer content delivery -- yet with decidedly old-fashioned media.
Without an agreement amazon has no right to sell digital copies and certainly no obligation. Comcast made an obligation to deliver content when they agreed to provide internet service to their customers.
The digital side of amazon story is not interesting in the slightest. The only real story is them leveraging their print marketplace to put pressure on a digital agreement. It's an abusive hardball tactic but one that large brick and mortar bookstores have done in past.
This story shows that publishers are really obsolete. The production doesn't matter anymore with Print-On-Demand and Digital. The main services they offer are distribution and promotion. Many of the publishers have offloaded their distribution to amazon (and the like) and unless you're a big author the promotion is virtually non-existent. One could also argue they provide editing but now there are editors for hire to support indie writers.
How do you figure that? Yes you might not have an ebook store built into your device but you are not locked into ONLY obtaining your ebooks from Amazon.
There actually seem to be quite a few "news outlets" that received a press release from Hachette, and yet their own press release page is horribly old: http://www.hachette.com/en/press/press-releases
The point is, you can’t really substitute one book for a similar one in quite the same way you can substitute for a roll of toilet paper or a dinner plate or an umbrella or whatever.
I mean, they're not quite commodities. But there's no shortage of close substitutes for most books. Books are subject to competition from other books, which causes price pressures, just like most goods.
"But there's no shortage of close substitutes for most books"
When the next book in a series arrives, there is no substitute. I would love to have seen someone trying to tell a Harry Potter reader that this other book is a substitute.
So, lemme ask you a question. When you see a statement that something is true MOST of the time, what exactly possesses you to think that citing ONE EXAMPLE is a rebuttal?
And again, books are absolutely not commodities. Nobody is saying there's no difference between the preference for Harry Potter versus Percy Jackson or what have you. But Percy Jackson is certainly a close substitute for Harry Potter, so if the price difference between them is great enough, some readers will choose to read Percy Jackson instead of Harry Potter, and the number of readers for which this is true grows as the price difference does. This is also true if the supply of Harry Potter books is restricted. (This is the principle that makes small airport bookstores work, incidentally -- given the constrained supply of books available for purchase, airport book stores stock the most popular titles they can and figure that people will substitute their most preferred book that's available for the book they would purchase if the store carried a larger selection. And often enough, they do.)
And this is true for most goods. Android phones and iPhones are close substitutes for each other -- if you want one, that's the one you want, but if the price difference gets high enough, you'll go to the close substitute, and people vary in their level of price sensitivity. If the price of corn tortillas gets high enough, you'll start eating flour tortillas. And so on and so forth. This is pretty basic economics here.
> So, lemme ask you a question. When you see a statement that something is true MOST of the time, what exactly possesses you to think that citing ONE EXAMPLE is a rebuttal?
I don't believe it is true much of the time. Maybe for technical books, but even then it is not because authors matter.
Picking between authors you like or have heard good things about is one thing, but they are not interchangeable. If I am waiting for the next in a series and I go to Amazon and they pull this crap then I will have to go elsewhere. The book is more important that a seller. If I want a certain painters art on my wall, I buy that print, not a "well Amazon didn't have that so I'll get a Fred".
"It is good to see Amazon acknowledge that its business decisions significantly affect authors’ lives."
Because when people aren't finding these books available through Amazon, or are finding them at a higher markup than other books, some of them aren't going to Barnes and Noble or Books-A-Million or to Actual Physical Bookstore to get them. Now, some of these missed purchase opportunities may simply be books that aren't sold at all, but some of them are going to be consumers buying other books. Because books are close substitutes for other books.
>When the next book in a series arrives, there is no substitute.
This is only because publishers enjoy an artificial monopoly on the production of specific works thanks to copyright. Without these limits, you would see a free market in competing editions of the same books, such as exists for books in the public domain.
> This is only because publishers enjoy an artificial monopoly on the production of specific works thanks to copyright. Without these limits, you would see a free market in competing editions of the same books, such as exists for books in the public domain.
No, I wouldn't because J. K. Rowling would have never wrote it since she couldn't make a living at it and wasn't independently wealthy.
Allowing people to make money from what they are good at seems to work best. Ask authors about having to cram writing into little blocks of time outside of a job that they would rather not be doing. Other motivations are fine, but people got to survive.
Looking a Linux, it seems most commits are by people getting paid.
Other than length of time (which is way too long), how is today's copyright extremely restrictive? and how can it be made less restrictive and still remain a copyright?
The majority of open source software is written so that somebody can make money off it. It just happens that what they're making money off of isn't the software itself, the software is a means to an end.
Have you ever found fan fiction that spanned upwards of three hundred pages, was actually well written, and was not written for profit?
That's generally true, but I would say that in some instances you can substitute one book for another. For instance, books on a particular programming topic are often interchangeable.
The bulk of book sales, especially online with eBooks, aren't for great literature, it's for stuff that is essentially thinly-veiled fanfiction, written very quickly, to appease a niche market. 50 Shades of Gray is an excellent example: it's pretty well understood to be Twilight fanfiction. The writing is awful, even the people who enjoyed the book (BOTH series, even) admit that the writing is awful. The writing merely fills a hole in a niche market.
Just peruse any eBook catalog for a few minutes, try to detect trends. The vast, vast majority of books are pedestrian pieces in niche genres, genres whose readers are willing to buy just about everything in it.
The dirty secret is that this is not really that different from the traditional publishers. Read a paperback romance novel. Anyone who passed their college-level English composition classes with at least a C should be able to make a decent living as a writer. It really only takes churning out titles, which is easier than churning out software projects.
I found the discussion, cited by the Amazon response, pretty insightful (and it shows some shades of grey - no not 50! - with regards to the issue at hand)
Enough people are getting upset about this that I expect both sides to make apologetic noises and shuffle towards a resolution at an increased pace. As far as finding out what really went down, or what the resolution ends up being I am doubtful at best.
Also, that was a lot of words with basically no content:
"We publish books. We think books are special. We have not yet reached an agreement with Amazon to keep selling books to them, but we will eventually.
Also, we think this is all Amazon's fault and we're not going to consider their proposal to pay our authors in the meantime until after we resolve the contract dispute."