07-23-2018, 12:38 AM | #46 | |
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You contradict yourself. That was exactly what I was talking about.
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You want books freely available for everybody. And still you even acknowledge that writers are trying to make money (won't work for free). That leaves nothing that will be published any more. Piracy did exist and will most likely always exist. And once it becomes mainstream (as in your dystopian vision), the system will fail. It is far from mainstream right now. |
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07-23-2018, 12:59 AM | #47 | |||
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Honestly I really do. I think that would be an awesome future. A shining path for all mankind that we are probably going to be too ignorant to walk. Quote:
EDIT: I realized I never answered your point about creators and money. Well, I was reading Dune not too long ago, and the foreword talked about how he didn't expect it to be a commercial success, he just knew he had to get the story out. That's a real writer, as can be seen by the diffference between Frank Herbert and Brian. The Franks of the world will write regardless and it will be awesome. The Brian will find other jobs and we will all be the better for it. Like I said, I guess that depends on your individual reality and your definition of mainstream. Personally I think if a system can fail, it should. All I'm saying is that this decision, while theorized to have something to do with piracy, will do nothing as usual and the only people affected will be the poor and the non-savvy. Last edited by sealbeater; 07-23-2018 at 01:15 AM. Reason: Expanding a response. |
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07-23-2018, 01:18 AM | #48 |
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The honest people that are poor already have options. It is called a public library. A library is not free, but does make available plenty of reading material free of charge that would otherwise be too expensive for the patron.
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07-23-2018, 01:28 AM | #49 |
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And as I pointed out, this group is the only group this will affect. Personally I find libraries limited in many ways although I believe them to be a valuable resource and the older I get, the more I wonder if it's not deliberately so. What you call "honest", I call "the acceptance of intellectual chains". Public libraries are obviously a chokepoint on the intellectual resources available to the poor and non-savvy or "honest".
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07-23-2018, 03:24 AM | #50 |
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Some people simply must write, be it good or bad, commercial or not, just as some must make music or paint or sculpt or participate in any number of other arts or hobbies. The comparison to sport, where many participate but few professionally is not an entirely irrelevant one. There will still be books written if there is neither copyright nor monetary reward of any type. The Roman Empire had no intellectual property laws, yet still managed to produce works still admired today. Most authors in modern times are never able to make a living from their work, though many are motivated by the prospect that they might. Without some reasonable incentive for authors there will still be stories told. There will still be books, or at least ebooks, and they will be very widely available at little or no cost. But the unfortunate fact is that the standard generally will almost certainly fall, and there will be huge numbers of books which will simply not be written. Including many great books.
Our current intellectual property laws including copyright are badly broken. At worst they do positive harm. At best the bulk of the rewards that they provide accrue not to the actual authors or creators but to that group referred to as "rights-holders", who hold those rights for obscene and unjustified amounts of time. Certainly a fundamental review is long overdue, but will not happen because of the power of lobbyists and vested interests. Such a review should also consider whether a statutory monopoly is the best way to provide the desired incentive. Personally I suspect it may be though in a much shorter and restricted form. But other alternatives should also be considered. I am not publicly condoning piracy nor suggesting that people break the existing laws, even though I consider them to be very bad laws in many respects. I hate to see authors not getting paid but must admit to not shedding any tears for some rights-holders in that position. |
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07-23-2018, 07:19 AM | #51 | |
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07-23-2018, 07:29 AM | #52 | |
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Amazon happily adopted Agency pricing once their competition faded away. Amazon sustained below cost pricing on certain key books because they were able to use their much larger business to subsidize ebooks in order to maintain their market share. The only thing that Amazon from a pricing point of view has shown is that it's good to have deep pockets. |
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07-23-2018, 08:18 AM | #53 | |
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Ben Franklin, the main proponent of putting copyright into the Constitution was a newspaper publisher and wrote to fill space in his newspaper, not to sell books. He wanted copyright to keep other newspapers from simply printing his stories in their papers. Even up through the 50's the vast majority of fiction was first serialized in magazines. Form followed payment. Dickens and Verne wrote lengthy, somewhat repetitive books with chapter lengths that made each chapter easy for serialization. For example, A Tale of Two Cities, was first published in 31 weekly installments in a literary periodical. I suspect that a tiered copyright system would solve a lot of problems. Heck, I suspect that even something as simple as making copyright holders file for copyright and then renew the copyright every seven years (the original term of copyright in the US) might solve a lot of problems and save a lot of orphaned works from obscurity. In the US, the primary driver for long copyright periods is movies and music. Publishers and authors simply don't have the economic hefty. I've more sanguine of improved results than you are. Eventually, something will happen that crystallizes a new business model. Culture leads laws, not the other way around. Culture in the US, IMPO, is heading towards having everything available. Kids are use to using YouTube to watch video and listen to music. I would not be terribly surprised if at some point, something similar to the consent decree that made it practical to play music on the radio occurring for other media. There are too many people working towards that point. |
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07-23-2018, 08:59 AM | #54 |
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John Scalzi weighed in on this with a reasonable take:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2018/07/...lending-thing/ |
07-23-2018, 10:13 AM | #55 | |
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One thing that is implicit in all this that I find interesting is that Tor thinks they have enough of their books checked out via this in the first four months to make a difference. Tor has the data that tells them how many copies of various authors get checked out and they know how many licenses they sell to the various libraries for each book. Of course, we know that if Scalzi is a best selling author and if the sales figures that he has posted in the past are correct (around 24K ebooks in the first year for Lock In), then for the average Tor author, the ebook sales are likely under 10K for ebooks. It's been 3 years since those figures, so the numbers may have shifted a bit, but I suspect for most authors, every sales counts a lot more than most readers think. |
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07-23-2018, 01:35 PM | #56 |
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As long as Angry Robot doesn't do this too.. not sure how I feel about this..
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07-23-2018, 02:58 PM | #57 | |
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Both where doing well before agency. After, not so well. So yes, Apple and the price fix five did put both companies out of business. |
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07-23-2018, 03:46 PM | #58 | |
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07-23-2018, 08:12 PM | #59 | |
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@pwalker8. I dealt with neither and haven't looked into at all until just now. As I understand it:
B&N acquired Fictionwise on March 5 2009 and announced grand plans for it as part of B&N's "digital strategy". It would seem that Fictionwise had been doing quite well up until that time. Amazon gave in to Macmillan on 31 January 2010, and the operation of the price fixing conspiracy took effect then or shortly thereafter. In March 2010 Fictionwise discontinued its Buywise club, giving no reasons for its decision. It seems logical that a club offering discounts on Big 6 titles would no longer be able to do so under agency, and the club was likely discontinued for this reason, though no reason was in fact given. In November 2012 Fictionwise announced it was "winding down its business". Books on Board stopped selling ebooks in early 2013. Bob Livosi, the owner, blamed both the deep pockets of his larger competitors and the lingering effects of agency. So far as agency is concerned he pointed not to the end of discounting but to the way the switch was handled. To quote from the article in Publishers Weekly at https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...ook-sales.html: Quote:
Last edited by darryl; 07-23-2018 at 08:15 PM. |
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07-24-2018, 04:42 AM | #60 | |
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I think you need to recheck your timelines. According to the court case, Apple didn't contact the publishers to start talks until December 9th, 2009. B&N bought Fictionwise 10 months earlier apparently to fold into their upcoming ebook store, a fairly common strategy. My understanding is Fictionwise was purchased for their customer base, not for their business model or actual store. Kobo did the same thing later with the Sony store. Apple initially started with the suggestion of a couple of price points, which is how iTunes music worked. The publishers balked and Apple eventually suggested the Agency model. Amazon learned about the upcoming deal on January 18th, 2010 and complained to the FTC about it on Jan 31st. Amazon didn't have an agency agreement with the publishers until later in the spring. Frankly, Amazon's pricing probably had a lot more to do with those stores going belly up than any future Apple "collusion". At that time, the stores were welcome to charge whatever they liked, but were charged a specific price by the publisher based on the suggested retail price. Amazon sold some books for less than they had to pay the publishers and many others at a very small profit. This is called a loss leader and is used to build market share. I suspect that Amazon thought that they could use their 90% market share to squeeze the publishers into reducing the price Amazon was charged, a tactic they tried after the ruling. It didn't work due to the outcry when word of their squeeze play hit the news. One could argue that the news outcry against Amazon in favor of the publishers lead to Bezos buying the Washington Post in 2013. Since Amazon has much deeper pockets than the smaller ebook stores, they could out last them. Thus you see Fictionwise selling themselves to B&N in March of 2009. Books on Board never used the agency book model. When the agency model came around, they stopped carrying the big 5 books. Their issue was lack of capital. Their owner was quoted as saying he just couldn't compete with the deep pockets of Amazon, Apple and B&N. The agency model drove us out of business narrative was mostly an attempt to get into Apple's deep pockets. Several of the small ebook stores tried to sue Apple making this claim. They lost the case in court. Last edited by pwalker8; 07-24-2018 at 04:46 AM. |
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