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Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

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IainB:
It's not just Amazon that are publishing.
This seems to be self-publishing: The Book World Is Changing: Mark Cuban Creates A Best Seller Out Of Some Blog Posts
The idea of being able to produce smaller books, much more quickly is really quite appealing. And the legacy publishers still just aren't getting it.
--- End quote ---

Probably don't want to get it.

40hz:
It's not just Amazon that are publishing.
This seems to be self-publishing: The Book World Is Changing: Mark Cuban Creates A Best Seller Out Of Some Blog Posts
The idea of being able to produce smaller books, much more quickly is really quite appealing. And the legacy publishers still just aren't getting it.
--- End quote ---

Probably don't want to get it.
-IainB (December 05, 2011, 09:01 PM)
--- End quote ---


Oh...I think the "legacy" publishers "get it" just fine. It's the kiddies piling on the bandwagon for some quickly cranked-out 'get rich' anecdotal 'biz' books that are missing the point so far.

What's much more likely to happen for most of this "new" publishing market is the reading public will quickly tire of all the garbage that's being shoved into ebook format as quickly as possible. Much of the hype I'm seeing with this stuff strongly resembles the nonsense surrounding 900 phone number "business opportunities" way back in the 90s. Some folks will make a fortunes. Then hordes of johnny-cum-latelys will pile on the bandwagon. Then the public will wake up to what it's getting served and drop all of them like a bag of day old garbage.

I friend of mine bought Cuban's book. I took the opportunity to give it a read. I'm very unimpressed despite its best seller status. While it may be popular - I can't say I consider it a good book although YMMV.

I think even Mssr. Cuban isn't so sanguine as to call his 'book' a legitimate win:

Were you surprised at the immediate great sales?

I had no idea what to expect. I literally didn’t ask anyone what a good number would be. So when it popped up on the bestseller lists and at the top of all business books, I was truly surprised.

This is new to me. This is new to the industry. From here, hopefully I will be able to figure out whether this is just a one-off situation, or something that I or others can replicate.

Maybe I just got lucky.
--- End quote ---


Yes. I think maybe he did at that.  ;D

IainB:
@40hz: Oh. I see what you mean. Yes, maybe this "new" market state has a lot of "settling down" to do yet.

Separately, I see the FT is reporting that:
Online retailer [Amazon] acquires Marshall Cavendish children’s books in bid to secure bigger share of ebooks and take on Apple’s tablet.
--- End quote ---
Growth by acquisition is usually a valid business approach, and the bonus is that it narrows down your potential competitors too.
Oh, but wait...I wonder which comes first?

Carol Haynes:
Its an interesting choice of acquisition though - I would have though that one of the areas that the Kindle really isn't good at is children's books - simply because the technology doesn't have a large enough screen or colour for pictures.

40hz:
Well, it seems the real business model is Balkanization of a given market.

That means eliminating open standards and non-proprietary storage formats. Which I guess now includes paper books.

Funny thing is that this had been tried before with early music recordings which were matched to specific brands of players. It wasn't until the standard 78 and LP formats emerged that records really took off as a product. Same went for phone technology. That market didn't explode until after governments stopped granting telcos the power to decide what devices could be connected to the networks.

Quadraphonic sound never made it because of competing non-compatible disk formats. Sane went for early laserdisc technologies, and to a lesser extent Sony's technically superior Betamax. The buying public refused to pay the stiff premium it would cost. Sony refused to license Betamax to content creators for reasonable terms. Enter VHS - and the rest was history.

Looks like ebooks are going to go through the same learning curve.

Eventually I think ebook distributors will realize closed formats and locked systems don't increase market opportunities, they damage them. In their desire to own the entire ebook marketplace, and play troll under the bridge, they're only hurting themselves in the long run.

Let's just hope it doesn't take another 10 years before they figure that out.  :-\

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