e-books and the amazon saga

[davefreer]

A great deal has been said about the battle between Amazon and Macmillan and the role of Apple's new reader and agency model (which BTW generally leaves authors poorer - and is superficially not good for publishers either.) What hasn't really been said is WHY it's such a big fight. The nearest some people have come is 'it's about control' and 'e-

Comments

[6_penny]

Also ignored in all the dewy-eyed hype about e-books is how the reader finds new authors. I for one don't like buying pigs in pokes...even at 'LOW-LOW-LOWPRICES'! In an 'old fashioned bookstore' - preferably an indie- I can pick up a book by an unknown author (at least I used to in the good old days) and see if it seems attractive enough to buy it. The token socalled samples offered by say Kindle don't hack it, and anyway one cant see enough of the thumbnail of the "cover" to even have that to induce one to go through the download procedure for the 'samples'. Many times about half of the 'sample' consists of cover, title page, copyright page, table of contents, a couple of blank pages, a wee schmear of text, and the back cover.
This has never been the way I get the feel of a book in a real store.

Has any reader in the entire history of commercial publishing been attracted to a book by the copyright page?

[masgramondou]

Speaking from experience, the Baen practice of putting up roughly the first 25% of the book has hooked me a number of times when I wasn't sure about a book. If I'd just had the first 10 pages they would have lost the sale.

And seeing the copyright page and the beautifully laid out title page have mostly made me thing I want to shoot Amazon and the publisher concerned...

[davefreer]

Yeah, I'm with you, and Francis on this 25% seems a reasonable sample. And I like to browse, and buy books by the cover.

[masgramondou]

Hmm. I just wrote something that may cross over with Dave (and Paul Cory)

http://www.di2.nu/201002/04.htm

I think we're mostly in agreement but looking at things from a different direction.

[reverancepavane]

If you are interested in seeing some practical aspects of the future of the mainstream publishing industry, I suggest looking at the current state of the RPG industry (here might be an interesting place to start). In many cases they've already been forced through the wringer (having had a smaller customer pool to draw on), with the collapse of the local retailer and many of the established print distribution chains.
As you indeed suggest, a number of publishers have adopted strategems such as ransoming product, with extra bennies* for people wishing to make higher level donations. Indeed questions of pdf and print pricing have an incredible effect, given the smaller customer pool, and hence lack of volume discounting for printing. Ebooks have become an important part of the publishing regime because of this. They even have their own Amazon equivalent for pdfs, namely One Book Shelf (aka www.drivethrurpg.com and www.rpgnow.com).
And as you have suggested the barrier to entry does becomes negligible (as you can see by scanning some of

[dragonenvol]

Dave, I think you're making a simple mistake here, and that's to assume that the author-publisher relationships and the balance of power between the two will remain the same

[davefreer]

(shrug) I'm an optimist by nature and pessimist by preperation. It's not that I am not keen to see changes, or saying 'accept it'. I was explaining what the fight between traditional publishing and Amazon is about. I wouldn't be involved in this myself if I was ready to give up and not putting my own money and career on the line working at changing this

[davefreer]

Oh, BTW, I must disagree with you about this "since editing basically means having another literate person look your stuff over and correct your myopic mistakes."

I've been lucky enough to have my work structurally edited by probably the most talented structural editor out there (Eric Flint), and fortunate enough to have my wife Barbara (who is meticulous beyond my ability by far) line edit. I've never got a page back from her with less than 3 queries, and I appreciate it more than I can say, and have learned nearly a quarter of what I need to from her. I've also had a lot of first readers and many of them are literate authors. They're very useful, and much appreciated - but that's not editing. Editing properly is demanding hard work - I reckon less than 10-15 minutes a page and either you're a miricle author, or they're not doing the job. Good structural editors (and there are less of them than there are publishing houses, let us say) are very rare people. They can turn sows ears into silk purses ;-)

[reverancepavane]

I agree with you there. A good editor is worth their weight in gold platinum irridium. If in doubt, take a look at the "unabridged" versions of Heinlein's works that one publisher released compared to the edited versions.
Which is also why I think it won't be just authors that will be getting name recognition and branding with a shift to e-tailing books.
[Admittedly, in genre at least, this has happened in a number of cases; there exist a number of editors with name recognition in the public sphere.]

[onyxhawke]

Brilliant. Perhaps the most accessible post on the underlying why's and whats I've seen.