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Living Room / Re: Why ebooks are bad for you
« on: June 14, 2011, 05:38 PM »The lion's share of the money still goes to the publishers-40hz (June 13, 2011, 07:24 PM)
Not true -- the biggest share goes to the retailer.
who used to justify their percentage because of the mechanical reproduction costs they incurred by printing, binding, and shipping books.-40hz (June 13, 2011, 07:24 PM)
Not true -- it's always been a small part of publishing costs (10-15 per cent)
+1
Or maybe it's because the publishers and their stakeholders have invested significant resources into securing distribution channels that empower authors to reach end-users through efficient marketization which facilitates monetization of intellectual properties and brings increased value to works and content that otherwise would require individual artists to maintain ecommerce infrastructure and complex systems which would detract them from their artistic pursuits and feed them better, which could lead to food-coma, thus reducing their productivity in global markets and reducing their facetime with prospective buyers looking to enrich their lives through content consumption for which publishers can charge a premium to ensure the viability of authors, artists and content producers that can thankfully take full advantage of publisher channels and relationships that extend their reach beyond what they could hope to achieve by setting up a PayPal account, spending $25 a month on a web site, and doing the marketing that they would have to do anyways because they will only ever become a part of the long tail in the publisher's value-chain.-Renegade (June 13, 2011, 10:34 PM)
Any time these forums discuss the marketing of books/music/tech there is a general tendency to kick the big companies involved who want to make money. Add to that a general loathing of DRM without offering any idea as to how content creators are supposed to make any money. I have no illusions about big bad corporate life (I've done my time there) but putting two fingers up to the money-making machine without offering any alternative doesn't advance the argument.
Book authors face a serious problem making money from ebooks. No DRM, no income. It's that simple. I'm sure the good folk here will happily sponsor their favourite authors by sending them a few dollars a month direct. But the vast majority won't. And writers will just stop writing.
I used to be a local newspaper journalist and editor. The industry's income has vanished. Few people will pay for online news. The paper I worked for employed 35 journalists in its heyday. It now employs a handful. The story is repeated in countless papers across the UK. More importantly, the news they used to provide has vanished. Detailed analysis of local government spending, for example, or the performance of local schools and hospitals. And no-one has stepped in to do the same thing. Sure, all this information is out there, somewhere, if you know how to dig, and how to make Freedom of Information requests to government/official bodies, and how to analyse the data. But the average punter doesn't have the time or the inclination. Many local government officials and politicians are delighted to see local newspapers vanishing. And at its essence it's the same debate as books. If no-one will pay for the information, the writers and skills will simply disappear. And our lives will be the poorer for it.