Posts tagged #publishing
This behavior is what worries people about any marketplace where one player dominates — even if it’s not a monopoly. It’s the threat of something similar in publishing/ebooks, for example, with Amazon, that drove publishers to attempt to enforce the agency model. The fear is once you have effective control over an ecosystem, you lose interest in innovating or, indeed, maintaining it.
Sad to see them go; I started reading at issue three and always enjoyed it.
It’s the (lazy, cheap) publisher’s fault — Barnes and Noble quite obviously doesn’t automate such a process, as I have a number of O’Reilly books on ePublishing that mention Kindle specifically by name on my nook.
Nook version of ‘War and Peace’ replaces all instances of ‘kindled’ with ‘nookd’ | The Verge
“SFWA is redirecting Amazon.com links”
In recent days, Amazon.com decided to remove more than 4000 e-books from its website after a pricing dispute with IPG. The Independent Publishing Group is one of the largest independent distributors in the United States.
While Amazon has the right to decide with what company it does business, its removal of many of our authors’ books from its ordering system will have an economic impact on them. Our authors depend on people buying their books and a significant percentage of them have books distributed through IPG. Therefore, SFWA is redirecting Amazon.com links from the organization’s website to other booksellers because we would prefer to send traffic to stores where the books can actually be purchased.
To that end, our volunteers are in the process of redirecting book links to indiebound.org, Powell’s, and Barnes and Noble.
[source.] Emphasis mine. What good is an e-reader if no one wants to submit to your terms to have their content on it?
Barnes and Noble went through a version of this back in the 90s, when they were the big bad wolf in the publishing industry. (The company still demands a 55% discount off cover price for buying books from publishers, and are by no means a small fish.) But Bezos is the man that scares the publishing industry now, because he wants to be what neither Barnes and Noble or Borders ever tried to be: a publisher.
Amazon is no longer just another marketplace. It’s direct competition for publishers.
Grin and Tonic, the generally-clever humor column at the Barnes and Noble Review, is back! And this is actually a hilarious one.
Cross-posting from twitter: thoughts on Vanity Fair’s How A Book Is Born
Computer algorithms can tell me what else sells well. But they can’t find the next The Art of Fielding
It is kind of important to suffix statements like that with “…yet.”
Lemme just break out the #OurNewRoboticOverlords tag here…
(Seriously, though, when a computer can tell me why a book has “literary merit” or not, we’ve solved AI and have much bigger problems on our hands than bookselling.)
Cross-posting from twitter: thoughts on Vanity Fair’s How A Book Is Born
Finished reading the VF article/ebook on Art of Fielding, How A Book Is Born. Interesting. Agree w/writer that publishers fill need that ebooks don’t remove. In fact, publishers may be even more important in the digital world: if everything can be published, how else do we find the good? Computer algorithms can tell me what else sells well. But they can’t find the next The Art of Fielding, can they?
Bestsellers are generally a product of a publisher’s marketing/publicity departments, not necessarily a book’s “merit”. I recall @neilhimself mentioning that American Gods was “marketed as a bestseller”. Publishers help the marketplace decide what’s good. It’s not deterministic; just browse the remaindered table at BN to see publisher bets on bestsellers that didn’t pan out.
Publishers are combination investors, tastemakers, critics, and evangelists. These roles are hard for an author to take on alone.
(By Katherine Goldstein - Slate Magazine)
